CoMoRoC SIGNED

Project "CoMoRoC" data sheet

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 Project objective

Romances of chivalry are one of the most representative literary genres of Spanish Golden Age, which gained great popularity in XVI century. In the last few years, critical studies have stressed the importance of the uniformity of this corpus, which includes many imitations, sequels, and prequels resuming the threads of the narration where they were dropped. The main consequence is that the genre involves a great deal of stereotyping of the same situations, contexts, even episodes, which became common motifs and recognizable formulas for the readers. The fictitious biography of a knight-errant, a Christian prince who establishes his heroic credentials, finding love and power, is only the basic thread of a structure which presents a reiterative pattern where themes and motifs are usually combined in the same fashion. A motif is the smallest narrative unit of a tale, that shows persistence in the tradition, where it survived with a specific identity, and can be included in different contexts; it is a recurrent unit with a fixed narrative or descriptive content; generally, it concerns a specific episode or accident: the main action is consistent in every manifestation of the motif, but details can (and do) change. The main focus of this proposal is the analysis and categorisation of comic motifs (jokes and pranks) in the corpus of chivalric novels, starting from its most famous cycles. The research is also meant to study poetic and literary treatises of XVI-XVII centuries, to develop a reflection on the value, function and meaning of comic expression at the time. The comic elements of the genre will be then compared to the parody of the romances of chivalry realised by Cervantes in Don Quixote. This research will consolidate the general paradigm of the genre, studying its morphology; the concept of motif will be used as the interpretative key to approach both the formal aspect of the genre and its ideological background.