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 ...
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.
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