Document Type
Forum Theme 1
Abstract
Since its conception in the late fourteenth century, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been lauded not only for its virtually seamless synthesis of Christian doctrine, Celtic myth, and Arthurian romance, but also for the complex and enigmatic poetics that have come to define and establish it as one of the most unique and perplexing texts within the diverse and substantial corpus of late medieval literature. A meticulously crafted, structurally symmetrical, alliterative romance governed by the dynamic interplay of proximate opposites and ostensibly contradictory discourses, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Sir Gawain) furnishes a revealing reflection of the ideologically vexed sociocultural milieu from which it emerged through its interrogation of the changing cultural constructions of honor and the problematic nature of chivalric ideals and their functions within the medieval court. As a literary mirror of the discordant amalgam of cultural discourses being simultaneously circulated and circumvented by chivalric codes, Sir Gawain exposes the precarious position of chivalric ideals in court society:
Publication Date
Spring 2008
Journal Title
UNIversitas
Volume
4
Issue
1
First Page
1
Last Page
7
Copyright
©2008 April E. Cook
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Cook, April E.
(2008)
"Honor and Transgression: The Poetics and Politics of Shame and Guilt in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,"
UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity: Vol. 4:
No.
1, Article 7.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/universitas/vol4/iss1/7
