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.
