Journeys and Discovery in Seventeenth-Century Italian Prose Romances

Abstract

This paper has its starting point in the work on seventeenth-century Italian prose romances first published twenty years ago by Albert N. Mancini who identified, among other aspects of this genre, the centrality of court life in motivation action, providing a structural link for the development of plot, and establishing a typology for the protagonists. In the present discussion, examples will be given of thematic and expressive patterns taken from a number of seventeenth-century writers who draw on the heroic-gallant model. As well, it will be shown that the writers' focus on court life (or an extension of it) introduces, through the motif of travel, new possibilites for narrative development.