American Research Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

This article examines how representations of madness function as a critical strategy. Both works parody the conventions of chivalric romance, yet their portrayals of mentally unstable knights also create a literary space from which broader political and cultural tensions can be explored. The study argues that Ariosto and Cervantes use chivalric madness to question emerging imperial ambitions and the continuing influence of ideals associated with conquest, heroism, and territorial rule. Their critiques engage, directly or indirectly, with European expansion into the Americas, memories and representations of conflict involving Muslim and Moorish societies in the Maghreb, and symbolic models of governance articulated through the motif of the island. By locating potentially controversial criticism within the actions and perceptions of figures identified as mad, these narratives allow political and sociocultural concerns to be expressed through parody and indirection. At the same time, this narrative strategy raises an important issue for disability and mad studies. When madness becomes a metaphorical instrument for communicating social critique, experiences associated with mental difference risk being subordinated to their symbolic usefulness. The article therefore considers the double function of madness in these texts: as a means of exposing the contradictions of chivalric and imperial ideology and as a literary convention with lasting implications for the representation of disability and mental difference.