The Green Knight, a mysterious and powerful creature, offers a fateful and deadly challenge that tests the honor and courage of Gawain, King Arthur's youngest knight.

The Green Knight, a mysterious and powerful creature, offers a fateful and deadly challenge that tests the honor and courage of Gawain, King Arthur's youngest knight.

Product Description: The first bibliography on Gawain poetry in the last 20 years to focus on all four poems. Contains 942 annotated entries, lengthy explanations on each poem, plus an informative introduction and index.

By combining fantasy and realism, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight praises court life with an undercurrent of satire against a declining chivalric ideal. This edition focuses on the Middle English text, with a Modern English Verse translation on facing pages and extensive notes at the bottom of the pages. It discusses the manuscript, the anonymous poet and his other poems, and the structure of the poem and its audience, themes and characterization.

The Gawain-Poet is the name given to the northern poet who is generally accepted as the sole author of four 14th-century Gawain poems - "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", "Patience", "Pearl" and "Cleannes". This text introduces the reader to the poems, setting the works in their relevant historical and cultural context and developing lines of critical argument.

Product Description: This work offers an integrated interpretative analysis of the fourteenth-century English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The methodological and theoretical landscape of medieval literary studies, the narrative structure, the significance of green, the famous pentangle, Gawain's threefold testing and temptation, and the beheading motif are discussed...read more

This volume offers the complete text of a poem which, although an acknowledged masterpiece of medieval literature, makes abnormal demands upon the reader by reason of its subtle exploitation both of a difficult dialect of Middle English and of the special idiom of alliterative verse. There is no short cut through the difficulties, but this edition is designed to enable the modern reader to reach a sensitive first-hand understanding of the text as the only basis for valid literary judgement.

This celebrated fourteenth-century English romance has been frequently edited and translated, but rarely have edition and translation been presented together. This new edition with facing page translation makes the poem's difficult Middle English dialect accessible in a modern spelling format and offers a verse translation in a flexible alliterative line that follows closely the syntax and meter of the original.