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  1. Home
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  3. God and the Gawain-Poet
Publisher:
Boydell & Brewer
Online publication date:
May 2022
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781782045984
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781782045984
Subjects:
Literature, Anglo Saxon and Medieval Literature
Information

Book description

Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are 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.

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