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 is Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Cambridge; JONATHAN GIBSON has worked as a lecturer in the Universities of Exeter and Durham.