La tradition italienne du roman de chevalerie dans le miroir du "Don Quichotte"

The Italian tradition of the chivalric romance and Don Quijote have been put in relation in two main ways. First, modern criticism has often drawn textual and structural parallels between Don Quijote and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, covering several levels of composition. Moreover, the reception and canonisation of both these classics, appearing at different points in time but whose ideas link them, have been connected to the disintegration of the chivalric ideal, the founding of the modern novel, and even the birth of the modern conception of man. Second, Don Quijote represents a sort of ‘mirror stage’ of the genre after Chrétien de Troyes, a place of convergence where an identity-forming image of texts and traditions is fashioned. Thus it is often claimed that Arthurian tales and the French epic in Italy, the cantari, the poems of Pulci and those of Boiardo, all anticipate or prefigure various aspects of Cervantes’ novel or of its protagonist. We will address these matters, following the paths of the texts and of criticism, and the adventures and ordeals of Angelica in literary history across Italy and Spain.