Product Description

This is an innovative and original exploration of the connections between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the most well-known works of medieval English literature, and the tradition of French Arthurian romance, best-known through the works of Chretien de Troyes two centuries earlier. The book compares Gawain with a wide range of French Arthurian romances, exploring their recurrent structural patterns ad motifs, their ethical orientation and the social context in which they were produced. It presents a wealth of new sources and analogues, which provide illuminating points of comparison for analysis of the self-consciousness with which the Gawain-poet handled the staple ingredients of Arthurian romance. Throughout, Ad Putter plays close attention to the ways in which the modes of representation of Arthurian romance are related to social and historical context. By revealing in the course of their romances the importance of conscience, courtliness, and self-restraint, literati such as the Gawain-poet and Chretien de Troyes helped a feudal society with an obsolete chivalric ideology adapt to the changing times.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1225900 in Books
• Published on: 1995-04-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 296 pages

Review
"[Putter's] book...reveals a professionally comprehensive command of romance tradition accompanied by perceptive reading of texts and levelheaded insights into medieval culture. This is a very good book, both in it promise for the future and in what it offers us now."--Speculum
.,."a richly documented work, ambitious in its aims and admirable in its achievement...an extraordinarily informative and thought-provoking contribution to the study of Sir Gawain that no serious student of medieval romance can afford to ignore."--Modern Philology