Seeing the Gawain-Poet

Abstract

This is an examination of the descriptive art found in four medieval poems: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Purity and Patience. Generally accepted as being the work of a single author, alternately known as the Pearl or the Gawain-Poet, these 14th-century poems are bound together in British Museum Cotton Nero A.x. Readers of the poems rarely fail to admire their descriptive art - the minutely detailed and precisely visualized depictions of costume, landscape, interior funishings or storms at sea. Sarah Stanbury examines the Gawain-Poet's powers of physical description and the ways in which the poems focus upon the moment and act of vision. The text grounds its discussion in medieval aesthetics, contemporary narrative theory and iconographic study to explore the ways in which the poet consistently uses description as a narrative tool for dramatizing the limitations of human experience and knowledge.

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