The Convention of Innocence and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 's Literary Sophisticates

Recent criticism has contested the widely-held twentieth-century view that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight presents Camelot as undergoing a moral test instigated by its immoral rival court, Hautdesert. It has been argued instead that the poem's linguistic and rhetorical sophistication displaces any possibility of moral determinacy. If these two critical approaches are combined, the inhabitants of Hautdesert can be seen to have a moral agency of their own, which animates their intelligent and ironic deconstruction of Camelot's chivalric codes and of the rhetoric of medieval romance.