Italo Calvino, Il Cavaliere inesistente [The Nonexistent Knight]

Simona Wright (College of New Jersey)

Ed. by Jo Ann Cavallo, Columbia University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.6.1: Italian Writing and Culture, 453-present.
Vol. editors: Carla Bregman (Independent Scholar - North America), Jo Ann Cavallo (Columbia University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1959

Places

Cuba (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Italo Calvino’s chivalric novella, Il cavaliere inesistente [The Nonexistent Knight], is written in the form of an act of penance by a cloistered nun, sister Theodora, an omniscient narrator who plays a critical part in the story (Barrett 1992). Published in 1959 and included in the trilogy of the Antenati [Our Ancestors 1960], it is the last of the three allegorical tales whose protagonists — Medardo, of Il visconte dimezzato [The Cloven Viscount 1952], Cosimo, of Il barone rampante [The Baron in the Trees 1957], and Agilulf, of this work — form Calvino’s genealogic tree of the archetypal forebears of …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

3253 words

Citation: Wright, Simona. "Il Cavaliere inesistente". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 August 2019 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11650, accessed 21 November 2024.]

View recommended reading for this article

Save this article