Abstract
The exquisitely beautiful, fourteenth-century, Middle English poem Pearl
signifies at many different levels of meaning and participates in different
generic conventions. The poem has been called a dream vision, and as we
have seen, it can be interpreted as an elegy, an allegory, a consolation, and
a revelation. The poem certainly participates in multiple genres. In this final
chapter, my purpose is to suggest the ways that Pearl moves beyond the four
levels of meaning and participates in three sub-genres of the larger category
of folktale: the parable, the fable, and the fairy-tale.