Seminar paper from the year 1999 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1 (A), University of Zurich (English Seminar), course: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 16 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This paper discusses how the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight uses, explores and sometimes undermines the conventions of the Arthurian romance genre. As a basis for this investigation, a definition of the genre is sketched, using a structuralist model along with a set of typical motifs found in many romances. Having established the essential genre elements the papier then examines the way the Gawain-poet makes use of these in his text. After identifying the fundamentally generic structure of the poem the author concentrates on incidents where the poet plays ironically with the reader's genre expectations.

This book offers an overview of the origins, growth, and influence of chivalry and courtly love, casting new light on the importance of these medieval ideals for understanding world history and culture to the present day. Rethinking Chivalry and Courtly Love shows that these two interlinked medieval era concepts are best understood in light of each other. It is the first book to explore the multicultural origins of chivalry and courtly love in tandem, tracing their sources back to the ancient world, then follow their development—separately and together—through medieval life and literature. In addition to examining the history of chivalry and courtly love, this remarkable volume looks at their enduring legacy—not just in popular media but in molding our present-day concepts of human rights, professional ethics, military conduct, and gender relations. Readers will see how understanding the tenets of the chivalrous life helps us understand our own world today.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a masterpiece of medieval English literature and one of the finest Arthurian tales in any language. Though its ingenious plotting and verbal artistry continue to dazzle readers, it is written in a challenging regional dialect and uses many words that were already archaic when the poem was written in the late fourteenth century. This edition is designed to make the poem, in its original Middle English, accessible to students and general readers. Following standards adopted for editing other Middle English poets, the edition lightly normalizes spellings to make words more recognizable for a modern audience. Extensive marginal glossing of difficult words, thorough on-page explanatory notes, and a comprehensive glossary offer further support for readers. The historical appendices include other examples of medieval romance from France and Britain.

Second, the methodological heterogeneity of the past three decades of Rose research has been extremely fruitful.".

Now at seventy-three volumes, this popular MLA series (ISSN 10591133) addresses a broad range of literary texts. Each volume surveys teaching aids and critical material and brings together essays that apply a variety of perspectives to teaching the text. Upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, student teachers, education specialists, and teachers in all humanities disciplines will find these volumes particularly helpful.

This volume is an introduction to the fifteenth century through chronicles and personal recollections of a diverse group of its French- and English-speaking writers. It revisits some of the principal events and personalities of that era through anecdotes illustrating interpersonal behavior. It examines how writers evaluated the conduct of their contemporaries and how some of their pessimistic conclusions may have contributed to the reputation for decadence of their century.

This volume presents Middle English studies as a modern discipline which unites linguistics, literature, philology, the history of ideas, textual studies including recent developments in the study of text types and genres, as well as the sociohistorical perspective. This large variety of both traditional and new approaches is mirrored in the four main parts of the book, starting with texts and text types, and moving on to vocabulary, syntax and morphology, and finally phonology and orthography. Aspects of language contact as well as corpus linguistic studies are also addressed in a number of contributions. Author are leading experts in their fields, and come from the United States, South Africa, and all parts of Europe.