Book Description

Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso is one of the masterpieces of the Renaissance, a work which, many argue, signalled the apogee of Renaissance fancy on the precipice of irony and decline.This collection of essays brings together twelve noted Italian and American scholars to provide a complete picture of Ariosto and all his works, covering topics such as historical criticism relating to Ariosto's place and time; philological investigations into the varying literary styles of the author, especially outside of the Furioso; Ariosto's extrinsic relationships with other literary traditions; and formal and thematic excavations of the immanent aesthetics of the Furioso.

Each essayist acknowledges the fact that Ariosto's creations are charged with allusions and allegiances variously inviting recognition or demanding the status of record.This reading of his works reveals that Ariosto was not a writer who believed, as it was previously thought, that literature is something escapist or fantastic in nature, but one who, in writing and re-writing his works, tried to re-interpret literary tradition while incorporating the new literary instruments that were available to him at the time: Ariosto's literary production is an integration of tradition and invention. This new reading of his work will be essential to any Italianist's library.

Book Description
The topos of magic has fascinated people from antiquity to the present day.This study uses a thematic and structural approach to examine the various functions performed by magic in two important Renaissance epics, Boiardo's Orlando innamorato and Ariosto's Orlando furioso. It breaks new ground by exploring the association of magic with the chaotic and irrational, as contrasted more or less strongly with order and reason. It also examines the poets' use of magic as a vehicle in the Renaissance dialectic between fortune and self-determination. ... Read more

Book Description
Despite its immediate popularity and its acclaim as a modern equal of the ancient epics, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (published in its final version in 1532) was for learned readers a perplexing work: it mixed romance, epic, and lyric poetry, poked fun at its marvelous and outmoded chivalric matter, contained many interrupted narrative threads, and included base and lowborn characters. In exploring the literary debates involved in elevating the Furioso to the rank of a classic, Daniel Javitch maintains that this was the first work of modern poetry to provoke widespread critical controversy, and that the contestation played an inaugural role in the formation of the European poetic canon. The Furioso was seen by its early publishers to embody the formal, thematic, and functional characteristics of the highly esteemed epics of antiquity. Some critics, however, found in this poem new forms and functions that seemed better suited to modern times; still others denied the work any form of legitimacy. Showing how the Furioso became a locus upon which various and conflicting ideologies could be projected, Javitch argues that such a development offers the best indication of a poem's having achieved canonicity. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

Consummate illustrations for an epic of chivalry and wonder
Sure, Homer's Odysseus may have known the ways of many cities and the minds of many men, to say nothing of various monsters and enchantresses, but he had nothing on the reader who follows Ariosto's assorted heroes and heroines through the rollicking, raucous, kaleidoscopic, chivalric-epic world of "Orlando Furioso."The prospective reader of that massive opus may turn for an overview or foretaste of its attractions to this comprehensive pictorial treatment by consummate illustrator Gustave Dore.True, Dore may sometimes be thought to slight the satirical, tongue-in-cheek, and light-hearted aspects of the poem in favor of its epic sweep and moody solemnity.But his is a worthy visual accompaniment to one of the most astonishingly rich and splendidly entertaining masterpieces in all of world literature, and to its imagination, romance, sensuality, and adventurousness he certainly does full justice.

A great inspiration for illustrators,...and dreamers.
This book contains a treasure of very atmospheric and detailed scenes. Doré's masterly use of superwide pespectives is an open invitation to explore his detailed and scetched people, landscapes, castles, heroes, battlefields and romantic situations. The illustration settings cover an area as huge as old europe with an ocassional touch of Asia. A particular delight are the morphed human-animal creatures. This book is great for just diving in and imagining yourself in these bizarre environments. enjoy ! ... Read more

Book Description
The controversy generated in Italy by the writings of Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso during the sixteenth century was the first historically important debate on what constitutes modern literature. Applying current critical theories and tools, the essays in Renaissance Transactions reexamine these two provocative poet-thinkers, the debate they inspired, and the reasons why that debate remains relevant today.
Resituating these writers’ works in the context of the Renaissance while also offering appraisals of their uncanny “postmodernity,” the contributors to this volume focus primarily on Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Essays center on questions of national and religious identity, performative representation, and the theatricality of literature. They also address subjects regarding genre and gender, social and legal anthropology, and reactionary versus revolutionary writing. Finally, they advance the historically significant debate about what constitutes modern literature by revisiting with new perspective questions first asked centuries ago: Did Ariosto invent a truly national, and uniquely Italian, literary genre—the chivalric romance? Or did Tasso alone, by equaling the epic standards of Homer and Virgil, make it possible for a literature written in Italian to attain the status of its classical Greek and Latin antecedents?
Arguing that Ariosto and Tasso are still central to the debate on what constitutes modern narrative, this collection will be invaluable to scholars of Italian literature, literary history, critical theory, and the Renaissance.

Contributors. Jo Ann Cavallo, Valeria Finucci, Katherine Hoffman, Daniel Javitch, Constance Jordan, Ronald L. Martinez, Eric Nicholson, Walter Stephens, Naomi Yavneh, Sergio Zatti





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Book Description

Translated here for the first time into English, Sergio Zatti’s The Quest for Epic is a selection of studies on the two major poets of the Italian Renaissance, Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, by one of the most important literary critics writing in Italy today.An original and challenging work, The Quest for Epic documents the development of Italian narrative from the chivalric romance at the end of the fifteenth century to the genre of epic in the sixteenth century.

Zatti focuses on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, written in the early 1500s, and progresses to Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, written at the end of the century, but also touches briefly on Boiardo, Ariosto’s great predecessor at the Estense court in Ferrara, as well as on Pulci, Trissino, and many other Italian writers of the period.Zatti highlights the critical debates over narrative form in the sixteenth century that become signposts on the way to literary modernity and the eventual rise of the modern novel. Albert Russell Ascoli’s introduction provides context by mapping Zatti’s criticism and situating it among Italian and Anglo-American literary critical studies, making a case for the contribution this book will have for English-language readers.