Title God and the Gawain-Poet : theology and genre in Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight / Cecilia A. Hatt

Published Cambridge : D.S. Brewer, 2015

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Description 1 online resource (ix, 249 pages) Series JSTOR EBA Contents Frontcover; Contents; Preface and Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction: Signposts on the trail of the Gawain-poet; 1: Pearl, the jeweller's dream; 2: The difficulty of Cleanness; 3: Patience and the Book of Jonah; 4: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: an alternative romance?; Appendix: some biographical and contextual speculations; Select bibliography; Index Summary Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knightare accomplished examples of four different literary genres and represent some of the finest poetry in Middle English. They are, by turns, fast and funny, powerfully dramatic, gentle and ironic, telling of painful bereavement and the terror of victims of disaster and violence, as well as the comic bewilderment of people entangled in alarmingly mysterious situations. The anonymous poet's evident delight in the pleasures and artistry of courtly life has led some readers to suggest that he was a gifted but complacent frequenter of courts, his attention dedicated to the wealthy and his sympathies to the powerful, and moreover, that his poems pay the merest lipservice to religious observance. God and the Gawain-poet argues that, on the contrary, the poet's wide-ranging engagement with all human life explicitly acknowledges all material creation as God's gift, revelling in its physicality, in bodily senses and movement and the ways a community celebrates itself. Dr Hatt shows how, in exhorting readers to recognize and respond to the narrative of divine gift, he appears as an energetic Christian poet and a humane and compassionate observer. Cecilia Hatt gained her D.Phil from Oxford University Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Online resource; title from PDF title page (Jstor, viewed March 5, 2018) Subject God in literature. English poetry -- Middle English, 1100-1500 -- History and criticism Arthurian romances -- History and criticism Christianity and literature. Manuscripts, English (Middle) -- England POETRY / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh LITERARY CRITICISM / Medieval Arthurian romances Christianity and literature English poetry -- Middle English God in literature Manuscripts, English (Middle) England Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book ISBN 9781782045984 1782045988 1843844192 9781843844198

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