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Article: The play world and the real world: chivalry in 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.'
- Article from:
- Philological Quarterly
- Article date:
- September 22, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 University of Iowa. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The work of such new historicists as Stephen Greenblatt and Lee Patterson has focused the attention of literary critics on the meaning of history and the historical importance of the symbolic, the notion that man "above all makes meaning."(1) To emphasize this view of history, Lee Patterson borrows a phrase used in a different context by anthropologist Clifford Geertz: "the real is as imagined as the imaginary."(2)
Any student of late medieval social history can see the appropriateness of this borrowing, particularly with regard to chivalry. This institution has long been recognized as a beautiful fiction, producing a lovely, apotheosized version of the self with ...