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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Customer Reviews (1)

A scholarly study of two performances of Torquato Tasso's pastoral play Aminta
Staging The Pastoral: Tasso's Aminta And The Emergence Of Modern Western Theater is a scholarly study of two performances of Torquato Tasso's pastoral play Aminta, which took place fifty years apart (1574 and 1628). Micro-reconstructions of these staging help reveal how the inception of Western theater was far less linear and simplistic than one might think. Author Maria Stampino (Associate Professor of Italian and French, University of Miami) performed extensive archival research and offers English-speaking readers numerous documents never previously translated. A highly technical dissertation especially recommended for students and scholars of theater, performance, and cultural history, as well as college libraries.
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Book Description

In The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, Jo Ann Cavallo attempts a new interpretation of the history of the renaissance romance epic in northern Italy, focusing on the period's three major chivalric poets. Cavallo challenges previous critical assumptions about the trajectory of the romance genre, especially regarding questions of creative imitation, allegory, ideology, and political engagement.

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.