Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso (Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies) (Paperback)

by Valeria Finucci (Editor, Contributor), Ronald Martinez (Contributor), Daniel Javitch (Contributor), Sergio Zatti (Contributor), Walter Stephens (Contributor), Katherine Hoffman (Contributor), Eric Nicholson (Contributor), Naomi Yavneh (Contributor), Constance Jordan (Contributor)
Key Phrases: rogo alle nozze, fountain allegory, fountain passage, New York, Two Odysseys, Tasso's Armida (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"The value of these ten essays goes far beyond the implications of the title. Of major importance to all students of the Renaissance, these learned, careful studies of the chivalric epic and romance explore such subjects as genre, the relationship of the chivalric epic to the developing theatre, and the use of motifs such as deception...The essays are uniformly excellent in style and content."--Choice

Product 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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press (March 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822322951
• ISBN-13: 978-0822322955
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,897,280 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)