The Romance of Exchange: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

"The Romance of Exchange: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Sir Gawain and the Green Knight invites discussion in the light of contemporary theories of exchange. Central to its plot are various contracts, exchanges, and negotiations, but the poem also underlines the uncertainty of ascribed value and the impossibility of symmetrical exchange in such transactions, by offering a series of shifting and competing perspectives, both within the poem, and in the narrative's seduction of the reader. It is only at the end, for example, that the structure of emboîtement reveals Gawain's agreement with Bertilak's wife as the heart of the poem. The poem's formal equipoise attempts to contain these differences and imbalances; yet even the twinned signs of pentangle and girdle do not answer each other so much as destabilise the poem's appeals to a single semiotic system. Considered from a broader, historical perspective, the poem is marked by a number of rival discourses which find a specific point of focus in the political, geographical, and cultural mobility of the poem's original audience.