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Literary Criticism Italian

The Quest for Epic

From Ariosto to Tasso

by (author) Sergio Zatti

edited by Dennis Looney

Publisher
University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Initial publish date
Jul 2006
Category
Italian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780802093738
    Publish Date
    Jul 2006
    List Price
    $35.95
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802090317
    Publish Date
    Jul 2006
    List Price
    $92

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Description

Translated 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 rise of the modern novel. Albert Russell Ascoli's introduction provides context by mapping Zatti's criticism and situating it among Italian and Anglo-American literary critical studies, making a case for the contribution this book will have for English-language readers.

About the authors

Sergio Zatti is a professor in the Department of Italian Literature at the University of Pisa.

Sergio Zatti's profile page

Dennis Looney is an associate professor in the Department of French and Italian and Assistant Dean of Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh.

Dennis Looney's profile page