Emotion and Places in Chrétien’s Romances

Human experience of places is based on emotional resonance: places make little sense to us if they don’t resonate with our feelings, and they are rather meaningful according to the intensity of the feelings we attach to them. Based on this general assumption, the paper will essentially focus on the idea that Chrétien de Troyes describes places so as to make them resonate with the interiority of his characters. In some relevant cases the very idea of emotional resonance substantially informs the way places are shaped in consideration of the overall meaning of the episode and/or the entire narrative.