Description
Book SynopsisTranslated 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 r
Table of Contents
Preface Introduction ALBERT RUSSELL ASCOLI * The Furioso between Epos and Romance * The Quest: Considerations on the Form of the Furioso * Turpin's Role: Poetry and Truth in the Furioso * Tasso versus Ariosto? * The Shattering of the Chivalric World: Ariosto's Cinque canti * Christian Uniformity, Pagan Multiplicity * Errancy, Infirmity, and Conquest: Figures of Conflict * Torquato Tasso: Epic in the Age of Dissimulation Notes Bibliography Index
