Orlando Furioso (by Ludovico Ariosto)

The controversy generated in Italy by the writings of Ludovico Ariosto & Torquato Tasso during the sixteenth century was the first historically important debate on what constitutes modern literature. Applying current critical theories & tools, the essays in Renaissance Transactions reexamine these two provocative poet-thinkers, the debate they inspired, & 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 & Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. Essays center on questions of national & religious identity, performative representation, & the theatricality of literature. They also address subjects regarding genre & gender, social & legal anthropology, & 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, & uniquely Italian, literary genre-the chivalric romance? Or did Tasso alone, by equaling the epic standards of Homer & Virgil, make it possible for a literature written in Italian to attain the status of its classical Greek & Latin antecedents? Arguing that Ariosto & 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, & the Renaissance.

Meanings of the Medium takes a new approach to the study of the past, present, and future of television. Most of its authors are not media experts but literary critics, philosophers, rhetoricians, and historians. They use their unique skills to examine three interwoven themes: the origin and meaning of American attitudes toward television, the relationship between "high" art and television's popular art, and the relationship between particular kinds of programs and the audience's sensibilities. Stressing an aesthetic and historical approach, the volume directs itself to the reasons why people watch particular programs and what these patterns tell us about ourselves.

Drawing on a variety of psychoanalytic approaches, ten critics engage in exciting discussions of the ways the "inner life" is depicted in the Renaissance and the ways it is shown to interact with the "external" social and economic spheres. Spurred by the rise of capitalism and the nuclear family, Renaissance anxieties over changes in identity emerged in the period's unconscious--or, as Freud would have it, in its literature. Hence, much of Renaissance literature represents themes that have been prominent in the discourse of psychoanalysis: mistaken identity, incest, voyeurism, mourning, and the uncanny. The essays in this volume range from Spenser and Milton to Machiavelli and Ariosto, and focus on the fluidity of gender, the economics of sexual and sibling rivalry, the power of the visual, and the cultural echoes of the uncanny. The discussion of each topic highlights language as the medium of desire, transgression, or oppression.The section "Faking It: Sex, Class, and Gender Mobility" contains essays by Marjorie Garber (Middleton), Natasha Korda (Castiglione), and Valeria Finucci (Ariosto). The contributors to "Ogling: The Circulation of Power" include Harry Berger (Spenser), Lynn Enterline (Petrarch), and Regina Schwartz (Milton). "Loving and Loathing: The Economics of Subjection" includes Juliana Schiesari (Machia-velli) and William Kerrigan (Shakespeare). "Dreaming On: Uncanny Encounters" contains essays by Elizabeth J. Bellamy (Tasso) and David Lee Miller (Jonson).