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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.

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Using feminist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructionist approaches to Torquato Tasso's 1581 "Gerusalemme Liberata" ("Jerusalem Delivered"), this work argues that Tasso explored alternate modes of writing and reading by reflecting on the genealogical tales of his non-Christian women characters Clorinda, Erminia, and Armida. Through these characters, Tasso explores a series of questions about their relation to the father. By examining the interpretive and ethical questions that arise from the problematic genealogies of Tasso's orphan daughters, the reader should arrive at a better understanding of the relation between the poem's dominant ideology and the stories that it seeks to suspend and displace. ... Read more

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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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The author examines the poetica and poesia of Torquatto Tasso (1544-95) in the context of the historical and cultural climate in which he lived. His epic theory is explored from the point of view of the three rhetorical faculties current in 16th-Century poetics: inventio, dispositio and elocutio. His discussion of dispositio reveals a fascinating similarity with ideas on art expressed by the Russian Formalists in the 1920's, a coincidence that can be attributed to the lasting influence of Aristotelian writings on plot. Dr Gunsberg draws on methodologies based on Freud, Lacan and the ideology of body language in her analysis of the Gerusalemme liberata. ... Read more