Ranging from Chretien de Troyes to Shakespeare, this study proposes that the chivalric romance is characterized by a centerless structure, self-conscious fictionality and a propensity for irony. The form is tied to historical reality, yet represents the archetype of imaginative literature, declaring its fictional status without claiming to embody fixed truths. Through use of irony, the chivalric romance precludes conclusive interpretations, inviting readers to inhabit multifold fantasy worlds while uncompromisingly showing that an ideal world is only a fiction. Thus the reader is enjoined to confront the suspension of truth in their own lives.

The social system of 'courtly love' soon spread after becoming popularized by the troubadours of southern France in the twelfth century. This book codifies life at Queen Eleanor's court at Poitiers between 1170 and 1174 into "one of those capital works which reflect the thought of a great epoch, which explain the secret of a civilization."

Philothée O'Neddy, one of the most flamboyant and outspoken members of the defiantly and insistently eccentric group of French writers known as the Jeunes France, whose members included Théophile Gautier, Petrus Borel and Gérard de Nerval, produced little fiction during his lifetime, but that he did produce was of the highest order. His longest prose work, Histoire d'un anneau enchanté, roman de chevalerie (1841), here translated into English for the first time by Brian Stableford as The Enchanted Ring: A Romance of Chivalry is one of the most remarkable products of the French Romantic imagination. Although the proto-Baudelairean aspects of the author's collection of poetry Feu et flamme have helped to maintain that volume's reputation at a higher level, Histoire d'un anneau enchanté, roman de chevalerie has an equal claim to be considered its author's masterpiece, with its marked unconventionality and admirable zest, which maintain its readability very well into the twenty-first century.