Arthurian Biopolitics: Sovereignty and Ecology in Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle

This essay examines the fifteenth-century popular romance Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle through a biopolitical lens. Arthur’s confrontations with the Carl’s alternate forest dimension tease out sovereign anxieties born of population and landscape, of fashioned spaces and natural environments. An ecocritical sensitivity to governmentalities opens up spaces to locate and analyze mutations of power in the poem and its relation to the political threshold of the Anglo-Scottish borders.