Why have literary works and corpuses – such as ancient Greek-Roman novels,
Renaissance chivalric literature, early modern extraordinary voyages, classical
French and English romances, or modern fantasy – been rejected from the
canon of high literature? This volume aims at introducing the concept of
anarchetype, in contrast to the concept of archetype, in order to define the
“flawed design” of texts which, contrary to the Aristotelian tradition, have no
closed structure or global organic meaning. This new-formalist approach will
allow the re-evaluation of literary narrative and genres which have been
judged by rhetors and theorists as marginal leftovers and failures devoid
of aesthetic value.
