Looking Westward : Poetry, Landscape, and Politics in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"

"Looking Westward" is a close study of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the perspective of the poetry, landscape, and politics of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Wales and the Welsh March.

Though not discounting the extensive influence of continental writers on this Arthurian romance, this book argues that - one should not ignore the western influences at hand: the Welsh alliterative poets as well as the prominent Welsh March aristocratic writer Henry Grosmont, the western landscape specifically identified on Gawain's journey, and the historical personages whose presence was so great in Wales and the March that they cannot be overlooked in the Arthurian fiction of the time.