Un’invenzione romanza: il romanzo e le sue trasformazioni nelle letterature medievali e moderne

Some aspects emerging from the reading of two fundamental works of the European literary canon (Don Quixote, Madame Bovary), make it possible to observe that nostal- gia is a crucial feature (maybe the crucial feature) on which the novelistic idealization of human experience is actually based. It also seems that the nostalgic idealization of a mythical past represents the very foundations of the Romance as a genre since its medieval origins, as Chrétien de Troyes openly explains in the prologue of his Chevalier au lion. Accordingly, the Novel as genre (that is as a social practice which includes within its conceptual system all the authors, the readers and everything it aims to describe, hence everything and much more than everything), looks like a plastic monumentalization of the very concept of Nostalgia, eventually its actual Pathosformel.