The Character of Time in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Abstract: The fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight shows how an idiosyncratic literary text can open new ways of thinking about that unruly topic, time. Through close readings of the poem and its sole surviving manuscript, I demonstrate how Gawain elaborates its own vision of dynamic, social time in its descriptions of time and characters. Through its evasion of teleologies, the poem offers a critique of discourses of inevitability. Gawain complicates an already complex picture of medieval time-schemes, demonstrating how literary works can add nuance to our understanding of how medieval time worked.