In her contribution “Tirant e il paradosso del Cavaliere inesistente” Roberta Capelli analyzes the third chapter of Italo Calvino’s heraldic trilogy Our Ancestors, The Nonexistent Knight (1959), from the perspective of the book profile Calvino drew of the late-15th-century Catalan novel written by Joanot Martorell, Tirant lo Blanch, published in the catalogue of the exhibition Tesoros de España. Ten Centuries of Spanish Books, held at the New York Public Library in 1985, and later gathered in his posthumous collection of essays Perché leggere i classici (1991). Capelli postulates that Calvino’s catalogue record raises some interesting issues of literary criticism with respect to the ideology of the libros de caballerías and the critique of Martorell’s novel that Cervantes invokes at the beginning of his Quijote.
Article language: Italian
