Banca de DEFESA: LETICIA RAIANE DOS SANTOS

In the tracks of Portuguese chivalry novels: formal reconfigurations in the 16th century

Keywords: Middle Ages; Portuguese literature; chivalry novel; chivalric novel form; century XVI; formal reconfiguration of the chivalry novel.

The genesis of the novel genre, for historians of Portuguese literature, such as Maussaud Moisés (2012), Saraiva e Lopes (1975) and Fidelino Figueiredo (1960), is exclusively linked to the Middle Ages. Following the same logic, several narratological studies written in Brazil and Portugal attribute to the cavalry novel the role of inaugurating, in universal literature, the novelistic form. However, research carried out in England, Spain, France and Germany, for example, since the 1960s, already pointed to the origins of formal elements and the novel itself since Classical Antiquity. According to Katherine Gittes (1991), Greeks and Romans, from the classical period, exerted influences on medieval European literature, since the frame-narrative, basic to the novel genre, emerges from two literary traditions: one western, through the Greek novel and classical Roman; and an oriental one, based on Indian religious texts. Since its inception, the novel has been presented as a more popular form and which, in turn, because it is not so tied to canonical rigor, like other literary forms, has greater formal malleability and could become and adapt over the years. In this sense, when analyzing the chivalry novel and its long stay in Portugal, we observe that it suffers some alterations in its composition throughout the 16th century, presenting new themes, cycles and modes of construction of the narration (greater psychological depth of the characters; incursions into lyrical discourses in the midst of prose; mixing between verse and prose; exaltation of the Portuguese people, through characters representative of their inherent heroic character; among other things) not explored in the Middle Ages. Howsoever, these transformations of this subgenre of the novel are not observed only during the 16th century, since the twelfth century, when it appears in the West, the chivalric novel does not emerge as a necessarily finished form, as it emerges with a writing in verse, Roman undergoes a process of prosification from the 13th century onwards, in which this subgenre not only becomes prose, but also inherits some compositional aspects of medieval historiography, such as the insertion of a fictional author in the narrative, the summary by chapter and the concern with detailing the events narrated in the text. Thus, the constitution of the form of the chivalry novel is a non-stant process, considering that the novel genre itself has formal malleability since the first texts created that were inserted in this type of literary tradition. This research aims to present the formal reconfigurations and paths of the medieval Lusitanian novel of the 16th century, based on chivalry novel such as: Crônica do Imperador Clarimundo donde os Reis de Portugal descendem (1522), by João de Barros; Palmeirim de Inglaterra (1541-1543), by Francisco de Moraes; O Memorial das Proezas da Segunda Távola Redonda (1554), by Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcellos; e Terceira [e quarta] parte da Chronica de Palmeirim de Inglaterra na qual se tratam as grandes cavallerias del seu filho o príncipe Don Duardos Segundo (1582), by Diogo Fernández. However, before approaching its transformations, we undertook: 1) to insert the chivalric novel into a novelistic tradition initiated in Classical Antiquity; 2) to demonstrate how other types of novels have in themselves some compositional aspects that will continue to be present in knightly narratives between 1522 and 1582; 3) define the cavalry novel as a subgenre, that is, a branch of a broader genre, the novel, establishing what is fundamental in its structure, considering that, among brazilian literary critics, only Massaud Moisés (2012; 2013) undertook a systematic study of its composition; 4) understand how medieval novelistics was formally established and that formal legacies of the subgenre come exclusively from the medieval period. From the discussion and analysis of these assumptions, we will seek to present how and through which narrative mechanisms the chivalry novel of the 16th century presented here are reconfigured.