What genre of books drives Alonso Quixano to imagine himself a knight?

Chivalric romances drive Alonso Quixano to imagine himself as a knight.

At the beginning of Cervantes’s novel, Alonso Quixano spends so much time reading stories about knights-errant, enchanted castles, giants, damsels, and heroic quests that he loses his grip on ordinary reality. He decides to revive the age of chivalry, renames himself Don Quixote de la Mancha, repairs old armour, chooses Rocinante as his horse, and sets out in search of adventures.

These books are not simply generic adventure tales. Chivalric romances were a popular prose tradition descended from medieval and Renaissance legends of knights, including works such as *Amadís de Gaula*. Cervantes both draws on and satirizes their conventions, making Don Quixote’s imagined world collide comically with inns, windmills, farm workers, and roadside travellers.

Readers sometimes confuse this influence with picaresque fiction, another important Spanish tradition. Picaresque tales focus on the survival of a socially marginal trickster, whereas Don Quixote’s madness specifically springs from excessive reading of knightly romances. The novel’s central tension comes from that collision between literary fantasy and everyday life.