The article offers a comparative analysis of two stories of knights in anachronistic conflict with the modern world: Cervantes' Don Quixote, a novel that continues to live a rich afterlife in contemporary Western culture, and Poiré's Les Visiteurs, the most successful French film comedy of the 1990s. It explores parallels between Cervantes' parodying of chivalric romance and Poiré's engagement with heritage cinema, and finds a common ambivalence in these texts towards both the romanticised past and the mundane present.
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