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Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Missing from the tradition of scholarship on the fourteenth-century alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are distinctly feminist forms of critical attention, an insufficiency only beginning to be redressed. This essay attempts, by way of a contribution, to tease out the poem's feminine text: another romance within this romance, one in which a feminine desire is recoverable at the limit of the masculine narrative, where the logic of the poem as the stage of its masculine characters slips and fails. The critical status of the pentangle and “luf-lace” is reimagined in the context of this other theater, where desire circulates among female figures in a relay of filiative and contestatory relations legible in traces, marks, and signatures at multiple textual levels. The argument restores, in part, a locus of strangeness to a 600-year-old text made familiar by settled conventions of reading and by the consolidation of criticism over time.