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Twentieth Century Interpretations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Twentieth Century Interpretations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Collection of Critical Essays | Denton Fox
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A great amount of critical commentary has been published on "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" since the poem first appeared in print in 1839. In recent years, it has become clearer that its author is dealing with profoundly important questions when he shows Gawain alone, in a baffling and inhuman world, drawn between the demands of the perfect truth to which he has pledged himself, and his own mortal imperfection. The essays in this book show the variety of modern critical approaches to "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and to medieval literature in general. Although the emphasis of this volume is on the poem's meaning and its literary qualities, some essays throw light on the poem by examining fourteenth-century attitudes toward chivalry, or the legendary history of Gawain. The contributors demonstrate that "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is not only the finest of the Middle English romances, but one of the great English poems. -- From publisher's description.
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'The Challenge Episode appears to us as a series of humiliations and discomfitures for the court which we feel as more comic than tragic. Despite the fact that the challenge is successfully met, the Green Knight departs from the scene as the victor in a kind of psychological warfare.'

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'That the poem still has meaning for the reader today is because, though the vocabulary has changed, the conflict between ideal codes and human limitations still persists.' ... 'English literature may offer a few, very few better narratives than Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but none more delightful and humane.'