Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

This wide-ranging study of language and cultural change in fourteenth-century England argues that the influence of oral tradition is much more important to the advance of literary than scholarship has previously recognized. In contrast to the view of orality and literacy as contending forces of opposition, the book maintains that the power of language consists in displacement, the capacity of one channel of language to take the place of the other, to make the source disappear into the copy. Appreciating the interplay between oral and written language makes possible for the first time a way of understanding the high literate achievements of this century in relation to momentous developments in social and political life.

This book deals with the eight major figures in the Arthurian legends and how they have been individually represented in literature from its beginnings up to the present day. The characters discussed are: Arthur the king, his queen Guenevere, his wizard Merlin, his half-sister Morgan le Fay, his faithful seneschal Sir Kay, his warrior nephew Gawain, his knight and rival Lancelot, and his incestuous son and nemesis Mordred. These characters are first identified in terms of their medieval origins, then explored in their varied depictions in modern fantasy fiction. The pattern that emerges is largely one of polarization of personality. The first study of Arthurian materials to focus specifically on the characterization of individuals, this book also achieves an original perspective on the evolution of individual characters from mythic prototypes.

Despite lip service to the proposition that the Pearl manuscript is the product of a single author, critics usually treat the four poems as isolated entities. The two authors of this work - who individually and together have produced a formidable body of research, criticism, and bibliographic study of this anonymous fourteenth-century poet - set forth a different thesis. They assume not only that the works share a common author but that they are connected and intersect in fundamental ways. They begin with the observation that the four Cotton Nero poems, taken together, extend from Creation to the Apocalypse and then transcendence to the heavenly Jerusalem. Comprising the entire scope of "History", the poems share a Creator whose active intervention in human affairs bespeaks a providential history that is the product of divine Will. Beginning with this premise, the authors discuss a series of interrelated themes (language, covenants, miracles, the iconography of the hand, and the role of the intrusive narrator) that successively arise from their initial observation. Every discussion treats all four poems, using each individual work to gloss the others. While this study builds on centuries of previous scholarship, much of what Blanch and Wassermann explore has never been discussed elsewhere. Some of the material - in particular their reading of the Green Knight's offer of weapons to Arthur's court, and the thematic significance of moral "handiwork" in the Gawain poems - not only breaks new ground but challenges accepted interpretations.

A critical study of all four works attributed to the Pearl poet, this new book differs from most previous studies of the Pearl poet by treating all of his works as a whole -- that is, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, and Cleanness.