The Reception of Gianni Celati's Orlando Innamorato Told in Prose

Fairies and Enchantments in a Gender Perspective

Abstract

This paper analyses the representation of the fairies in Celati's rewriting of Boiardo's L'Inamoramento de Orlando, highlighting their peculiar powers, their applications and the emotional relationships they have with the heroes, trying to deconstruct the cliché of the bad fairy. The rewriting, updating the language as well as the narrative perspective of the issues, highlighted some aspects already present in Boiardo but not easy to interpret for a contemporary public. My reflection about fairies follows two lines. On the one hand, these figures are contextualised in relation to Celati's literary production of possible reference (Fata morgana and Alice disambientata); on the other hand, I try to investigate the reception of this text in a broader perspective of the gender meta–gaze, a recent interpretative category proposed by gender studies in Italy.