Space and Narrative: the Inn and the Structure of the Early Modern Novel
Space and Narrative: the Inn and the Structure of the Early Modern Novel

Summary/Abstract: The article examines the inn as a fictional topos which corroborates apparently random stories in order to make the main narrative complete. I shall argue that the inn appears as a nexus of stories which are engaged in building the early modern novel’s architecture upheld by the relationship between road adventures taken as main narrative progression and the interpolated stories told at the inn understood as digressive narrative markers. I claim that this fictional inconsistency is nothing but a strategy adopted by the early modern novel to rework old genres like romance, the picaresque, chivalry books, and the pastoral and, more importantly, to built its own fictional architexture that unravels the intricacies of the main narrative. My analysis will focus on Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, an English copy of the former, yet enmeshed in the European tradition of the picaresque and comic fiction.

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