A Narrative Poetics of Adventure with a Case Study on Its History in Medieval and Early Modern Romance Literature

Abstract

Abstract: Adventure is a narrative pattern of fundamental importance in the history of the novel, but research on the topic continues to be divided according to philological specializations. This article strives to establish a conceptual synthesis and to push the inquiry forward. In the first section, it proposes a narrative poetics of adventure that is both sufficiently general to embrace the centuries-long tradition of adventurous storytelling as well as flexible enough to account for its particular historical forms. While gathering material from classical theories of adventure and from contemporary research, this study also follows an agenda of its own and argues that adventure should be conceived as a precarious balance between various contraries such as contingency and providence or risk and security. Adventure paradoxically strives to make these polarities coincide. The second section provides a case study in order to flesh out some of these claims. It retraces the transformations that lead from the inception of chivalric adventure—the courtly romances written by Chrétien de Troyes—to the moment when Cervantes integrates it into the modern novel as a figment of the imagination.