A Companion to the Gawain-Poet

The essays collected here on the Gawain-Poet offer stimulating introductions to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Pearl Cleanness and Patience providing both information and original analysis. Topics include theories of authorship; the historical and social background to the poems with individual sections on particularly important features within them; gender roles in the poems; the manuscript itself; the metre vocabulary and dialect of the poems; and their sources. A section devoted to Sir Gawain investigates the ideas of courtesy and chivalry found within it and explores some of its later adaptations from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. A full bibliography completes the volume.DEREK BREWER wass Emeritus Professor of English Literature University of Cambridge; JONATHAN GIBSON has worked as a lecturer in the Universities of Exeter and Durham.