Albert Russell Ascoli
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823234288
- eISBN:
- 9780823241231
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823234288.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter focuses on a major work of the later sixteenth century, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, whose narrative arc is shaped by the felt need for the poem to free its characters and its author ...
More
This chapter focuses on a major work of the later sixteenth century, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, whose narrative arc is shaped by the felt need for the poem to free its characters and its author from the burden of history itself, staged through the quest to “liberate” the empty tomb of Christ—symbol of the transcendence of death and the abandonment of the world of history for a haven above and beyond time. That the poem is only able to reach the literal tomb, but not to pass beyond, is a sign of the author's anxious fear that such transcendence is as impossible as it is desirable. Such an interpretation is further confirmed by the poem's deliberate evocation of its place in a literary history that, in addition to its systematic transformation of the Virgil's pagan epic of imperial conquest, includes, on one hand, the overtly transcendent vision of Dante's Commedia and, on the other, Ariosto's fierce parody thereof in Orlando.Less
This chapter focuses on a major work of the later sixteenth century, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, whose narrative arc is shaped by the felt need for the poem to free its characters and its author from the burden of history itself, staged through the quest to “liberate” the empty tomb of Christ—symbol of the transcendence of death and the abandonment of the world of history for a haven above and beyond time. That the poem is only able to reach the literal tomb, but not to pass beyond, is a sign of the author's anxious fear that such transcendence is as impossible as it is desirable. Such an interpretation is further confirmed by the poem's deliberate evocation of its place in a literary history that, in addition to its systematic transformation of the Virgil's pagan epic of imperial conquest, includes, on one hand, the overtly transcendent vision of Dante's Commedia and, on the other, Ariosto's fierce parody thereof in Orlando.
Peter Mack
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691194004
- eISBN:
- 9780691195353
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691194004.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas
In literary and cultural studies, “tradition” is a word everyone uses but few address critically. In this book, the author offers a wide-ranging exploration of the creative power of literary ...
More
In literary and cultural studies, “tradition” is a word everyone uses but few address critically. In this book, the author offers a wide-ranging exploration of the creative power of literary tradition, from the middle ages to the twenty-first century, revealing in new ways how it helps writers and readers make new works and meanings. The book argues that the best way to understand tradition is by examining the moments when a writer takes up an old text and writes something new out of a dialogue with that text and the promptings of the present situation. The book examines Petrarch as a user, instigator, and victim of tradition. It shows how Chaucer became the first great English writer by translating and adapting a minor poem by Boccaccio. It investigates how Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser made new epic meanings by playing with assumptions, episodes, and phrases translated from their predecessors. It then analyzes how the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell drew on tradition to address the new problem of urban deprivation in Mary Barton. And, finally, it looks at how the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, in his 2004 novel Wizard of the Crow, reflects on biblical, English literary, and African traditions. Drawing on key theorists, critics, historians, and sociologists, and stressing the international character of literary tradition, the book illuminates the not entirely free choices readers and writers make to create meaning in collaboration and competition with their models.Less
In literary and cultural studies, “tradition” is a word everyone uses but few address critically. In this book, the author offers a wide-ranging exploration of the creative power of literary tradition, from the middle ages to the twenty-first century, revealing in new ways how it helps writers and readers make new works and meanings. The book argues that the best way to understand tradition is by examining the moments when a writer takes up an old text and writes something new out of a dialogue with that text and the promptings of the present situation. The book examines Petrarch as a user, instigator, and victim of tradition. It shows how Chaucer became the first great English writer by translating and adapting a minor poem by Boccaccio. It investigates how Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser made new epic meanings by playing with assumptions, episodes, and phrases translated from their predecessors. It then analyzes how the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell drew on tradition to address the new problem of urban deprivation in Mary Barton. And, finally, it looks at how the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, in his 2004 novel Wizard of the Crow, reflects on biblical, English literary, and African traditions. Drawing on key theorists, critics, historians, and sociologists, and stressing the international character of literary tradition, the book illuminates the not entirely free choices readers and writers make to create meaning in collaboration and competition with their models.
Colin Burrow
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198117940
- eISBN:
- 9780191671135
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117940.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This book presents a comprehensive view of the epic tradition from Homer, through Virgil, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and the host of minor writers who helped create the idiom within which these writers ...
More
This book presents a comprehensive view of the epic tradition from Homer, through Virgil, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and the host of minor writers who helped create the idiom within which these writers worked, to the idiom within which these writers worked, to the individual authors in historical context link to develop a powerful explanation of how and why the epic changed from Homer to Milton. The book shows how the romance hero, whose prime motives are love and pity, emerged from a sequence of reinterpretations of Homer that runs from Virgil's Aeneid and its medieval redactions to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Relating the emergence of the romance hero to the digressive, decentred form of romance, the book explores how later writers sought to control the digressive energies of the romance hero and to create a language and form of heroism more like those of classical epic. This analysis leads to a fresh account of the way in which Renaissance writers responded to, and moved tentatively towards, the writing of the past. Arguing against the view that Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and Milton were engaged in a battle for mastery over their predecessors, the book reveals how they transformed interpretations of past epic in order to draw closer to the narrative forms of their classical forebears.Less
This book presents a comprehensive view of the epic tradition from Homer, through Virgil, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and the host of minor writers who helped create the idiom within which these writers worked, to the idiom within which these writers worked, to the individual authors in historical context link to develop a powerful explanation of how and why the epic changed from Homer to Milton. The book shows how the romance hero, whose prime motives are love and pity, emerged from a sequence of reinterpretations of Homer that runs from Virgil's Aeneid and its medieval redactions to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Relating the emergence of the romance hero to the digressive, decentred form of romance, the book explores how later writers sought to control the digressive energies of the romance hero and to create a language and form of heroism more like those of classical epic. This analysis leads to a fresh account of the way in which Renaissance writers responded to, and moved tentatively towards, the writing of the past. Arguing against the view that Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and Milton were engaged in a battle for mastery over their predecessors, the book reveals how they transformed interpretations of past epic in order to draw closer to the narrative forms of their classical forebears.
Helen Cooper
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199248865
- eISBN:
- 9780191719394
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199248865.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
The rudderless boat, in which the polluted (such as the offspring of incest or accused women), the politically dangerous (enemies or infant heirs), or potential saints are cast out to sea, is a motif ...
More
The rudderless boat, in which the polluted (such as the offspring of incest or accused women), the politically dangerous (enemies or infant heirs), or potential saints are cast out to sea, is a motif that extends from early saints’ legends through Tasso, Don Quixote and The Tempest: it provides an involuntary equivalent of the quest or pilgrimage. Sixteenth-century usages of the motif typically insist on Providence as a means of salvation, but they put more consistent emphasis on the providentially-guided transfer of power rather than on sanctity. The related motif of the magic ship constructed by a woman is also reformulated in the Renaissance to mythologize colonial expansion.Less
The rudderless boat, in which the polluted (such as the offspring of incest or accused women), the politically dangerous (enemies or infant heirs), or potential saints are cast out to sea, is a motif that extends from early saints’ legends through Tasso, Don Quixote and The Tempest: it provides an involuntary equivalent of the quest or pilgrimage. Sixteenth-century usages of the motif typically insist on Providence as a means of salvation, but they put more consistent emphasis on the providentially-guided transfer of power rather than on sanctity. The related motif of the magic ship constructed by a woman is also reformulated in the Renaissance to mythologize colonial expansion.
Jason Lawrence
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780719090882
- eISBN:
- 9781526128348
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719090882.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This interdisciplinary book examines the literary, artistic and biographical afterlives in England of the great Italian poet Torquato Tasso, from before his death in 1595 to the end of the nineteenth ...
More
This interdisciplinary book examines the literary, artistic and biographical afterlives in England of the great Italian poet Torquato Tasso, from before his death in 1595 to the end of the nineteenth century. Focusing predominantly on the impact of his once famous epic poem Gerusalemme liberata across a broad spectrum of arts, it aims to stimulate a revival of interest in an undeservedly neglected poetic masterpiece and its author, more than fifty years after the last book-length account of the poet in English.
Tasso’s poem is remembered in Anglophone criticism today, if at all, as a principal model for the celebrated Bowre of Blisse episode in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a complex literary appropriation which this study re-appraises thoroughly, in relation to both previously undetected contemporary English poetic responses to Tasso’s enchantress Armida, as in Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond, and visual representations of the episode across Europe. The book also traces the reception in England of notable seventeenth-century depictions of scenes from Tasso by Van Dyck and Poussin, and explores the Italian poem’s prominent role in the development of opera on the London stage, in works by Dennis and Handel. A second strand focuses on the numerous English responses to Tasso’s troubled life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, biographical and literary, exemplified in Byron’s memorable impersonation of the poet’s voice in The Lament of Tasso.Less
This interdisciplinary book examines the literary, artistic and biographical afterlives in England of the great Italian poet Torquato Tasso, from before his death in 1595 to the end of the nineteenth century. Focusing predominantly on the impact of his once famous epic poem Gerusalemme liberata across a broad spectrum of arts, it aims to stimulate a revival of interest in an undeservedly neglected poetic masterpiece and its author, more than fifty years after the last book-length account of the poet in English.
Tasso’s poem is remembered in Anglophone criticism today, if at all, as a principal model for the celebrated Bowre of Blisse episode in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a complex literary appropriation which this study re-appraises thoroughly, in relation to both previously undetected contemporary English poetic responses to Tasso’s enchantress Armida, as in Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond, and visual representations of the episode across Europe. The book also traces the reception in England of notable seventeenth-century depictions of scenes from Tasso by Van Dyck and Poussin, and explores the Italian poem’s prominent role in the development of opera on the London stage, in works by Dennis and Handel. A second strand focuses on the numerous English responses to Tasso’s troubled life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, biographical and literary, exemplified in Byron’s memorable impersonation of the poet’s voice in The Lament of Tasso.
Colin Burrow
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198117940
- eISBN:
- 9780191671135
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117940.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata has a very different setting. Most of its action takes place on the clear, open spaces of a plain around the city of Jerusalem. Two opposed camps are set against ...
More
Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata has a very different setting. Most of its action takes place on the clear, open spaces of a plain around the city of Jerusalem. Two opposed camps are set against one another in this open space: Jerusalem is occupied by Saracen forces, while a Christian alliance under Tasso's hero, ‘pio Goffredo’, besieges them and seeks to regain the town for his religion. There are a few moments when characters wander from the battlefield into a landscape of trees and greenery, and find a pastoral seclusion that is valued above the polarities of the battle; but these are rare. However, more usually the poem matches its open setting with correspondingly clear indications of which side people are on. This limits the possibilities for the moral and narrative entanglements in which Ludovico Ariosto so delights: the very geography of Tasso's poem suggests a polarized confrontation between Christian virtue and pagan sacrilege.Less
Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata has a very different setting. Most of its action takes place on the clear, open spaces of a plain around the city of Jerusalem. Two opposed camps are set against one another in this open space: Jerusalem is occupied by Saracen forces, while a Christian alliance under Tasso's hero, ‘pio Goffredo’, besieges them and seeks to regain the town for his religion. There are a few moments when characters wander from the battlefield into a landscape of trees and greenery, and find a pastoral seclusion that is valued above the polarities of the battle; but these are rare. However, more usually the poem matches its open setting with correspondingly clear indications of which side people are on. This limits the possibilities for the moral and narrative entanglements in which Ludovico Ariosto so delights: the very geography of Tasso's poem suggests a polarized confrontation between Christian virtue and pagan sacrilege.
Colin Burrow
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198117940
- eISBN:
- 9780191671135
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117940.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
There is no author so prey to double violence against self and past as Torquato Tasso; and there is no author who feels so keenly the tortured energy released by an antiquarianism that seeks vainly ...
More
There is no author so prey to double violence against self and past as Torquato Tasso; and there is no author who feels so keenly the tortured energy released by an antiquarianism that seeks vainly to strip away layers of anachronistic misreadings from past texts. The Faerie Queene might seem at first to be written in a quite different spirit. It is a bewildering amalgam of topicality and timelessness, which seems to celebrate the power of the author to blend different periods, different writers, and different idioms into one vast composite, with little sign that such a process is difficult or dangerous. Edmund Spenser's language mingles archaism with contemporary usage, and his imaginary location, Faerie-land, is at once a distant, idealized space, and a parallel version of things going on next door. The poem's allegory ranges from the very recent history of England to an atemporal world of myth.Less
There is no author so prey to double violence against self and past as Torquato Tasso; and there is no author who feels so keenly the tortured energy released by an antiquarianism that seeks vainly to strip away layers of anachronistic misreadings from past texts. The Faerie Queene might seem at first to be written in a quite different spirit. It is a bewildering amalgam of topicality and timelessness, which seems to celebrate the power of the author to blend different periods, different writers, and different idioms into one vast composite, with little sign that such a process is difficult or dangerous. Edmund Spenser's language mingles archaism with contemporary usage, and his imaginary location, Faerie-land, is at once a distant, idealized space, and a parallel version of things going on next door. The poem's allegory ranges from the very recent history of England to an atemporal world of myth.
Colin Burrow
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198117940
- eISBN:
- 9780191671135
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117940.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century epic writers had to work hard to invent a modern equivalent for the conceptual idiom of classical epic, and laboured both to unpick the idioms of earlier ...
More
Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century epic writers had to work hard to invent a modern equivalent for the conceptual idiom of classical epic, and laboured both to unpick the idioms of earlier imitators and to create in the process a role for epic in their society. They improvised a modern heroic idiom, often while they composed. A sense that they had got epic wrong frequently led them to revise and extend their poems: Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Robert Sidney, and Edmund Spenser all attempted to overcome the prevalent romance view of the Aeneid by revising their epic works, by fracturing and rewriting Virgilian episodes to accommodate rival interpretations, or by continuing their poems in a more ruthless idiom. They had to break away from a part of themselves in order to feel that they could write like authors of the past. And by developing the civic aspect of classical epic they sought to explore and modify the structures of power and of emotion that sustained their society.Less
Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century epic writers had to work hard to invent a modern equivalent for the conceptual idiom of classical epic, and laboured both to unpick the idioms of earlier imitators and to create in the process a role for epic in their society. They improvised a modern heroic idiom, often while they composed. A sense that they had got epic wrong frequently led them to revise and extend their poems: Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Robert Sidney, and Edmund Spenser all attempted to overcome the prevalent romance view of the Aeneid by revising their epic works, by fracturing and rewriting Virgilian episodes to accommodate rival interpretations, or by continuing their poems in a more ruthless idiom. They had to break away from a part of themselves in order to feel that they could write like authors of the past. And by developing the civic aspect of classical epic they sought to explore and modify the structures of power and of emotion that sustained their society.
M. J. Clarke, B. G. F. Currie, and R. O. A. M. Lyne (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199276301
- eISBN:
- 9780191706011
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199276301.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This collection of chapters, written by former pupils of his, celebrates the career of Jasper Griffin, one of the foremost modern scholars of classical epic. The book surveys the epic tradition from ...
More
This collection of chapters, written by former pupils of his, celebrates the career of Jasper Griffin, one of the foremost modern scholars of classical epic. The book surveys the epic tradition from the 8th century BC to the 19th century AD. Individual chapters focus on: Homer and the oral epic tradition; Homer in his religious context; Herodotus and Homer; Hellenistic epic; Virgil in his literary context; Virgil in his political-cultural context; the Augustan poets and the Aeneid; Statius' Thebaid; Old English and Old Irish epic; Renaissance epic: Tasso and Milton; and the Victorians. The aim of the book is to situate writers of epic in their literary and cultural contexts — the essence of the term ‘interaction’ in the title. The chapters singly offer insights into some of the foundational poems of the European epic tradition and together take a bold, holistic look at that tradition.Less
This collection of chapters, written by former pupils of his, celebrates the career of Jasper Griffin, one of the foremost modern scholars of classical epic. The book surveys the epic tradition from the 8th century BC to the 19th century AD. Individual chapters focus on: Homer and the oral epic tradition; Homer in his religious context; Herodotus and Homer; Hellenistic epic; Virgil in his literary context; Virgil in his political-cultural context; the Augustan poets and the Aeneid; Statius' Thebaid; Old English and Old Irish epic; Renaissance epic: Tasso and Milton; and the Victorians. The aim of the book is to situate writers of epic in their literary and cultural contexts — the essence of the term ‘interaction’ in the title. The chapters singly offer insights into some of the foundational poems of the European epic tradition and together take a bold, holistic look at that tradition.
Matthew Reynolds
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199605712
- eISBN:
- 9780191731617
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199605712.003.0016
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
‘Translation‐as‐desire’ can mutate into ‘translation as fantasy’: this occurs when the translator's imagination is frustrated by the source with the result that he (this is a predominantly masculine ...
More
‘Translation‐as‐desire’ can mutate into ‘translation as fantasy’: this occurs when the translator's imagination is frustrated by the source with the result that he (this is a predominantly masculine mode) goes off into a dream of his own. The mode flourishes in translations of romance: I dwell on Fairfax's Tasso (1600), and give a counter example from translations of Petrarch in Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets (1784). But since translation‐as‐fantasy has its main root in the translator's feelings rather than in the source text it leads beyond the boundaries of translation to enormously elaborative responses like Leigh Hunt's The Story of Rimini (massively expanded from Dante's episode of Paoloa and Francesca) and Swinburne's reveries on Sappho.Less
‘Translation‐as‐desire’ can mutate into ‘translation as fantasy’: this occurs when the translator's imagination is frustrated by the source with the result that he (this is a predominantly masculine mode) goes off into a dream of his own. The mode flourishes in translations of romance: I dwell on Fairfax's Tasso (1600), and give a counter example from translations of Petrarch in Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets (1784). But since translation‐as‐fantasy has its main root in the translator's feelings rather than in the source text it leads beyond the boundaries of translation to enormously elaborative responses like Leigh Hunt's The Story of Rimini (massively expanded from Dante's episode of Paoloa and Francesca) and Swinburne's reveries on Sappho.
JANE E. EVERSON
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198160151
- eISBN:
- 9780191716386
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198160151.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter focuses on the themes of love and war in epic poetry. It argues that these principal themes of the romance epic of the early Renaissance are virtually preset. The question facing poets ...
More
This chapter focuses on the themes of love and war in epic poetry. It argues that these principal themes of the romance epic of the early Renaissance are virtually preset. The question facing poets is not what themes to choose, but how to characterize them, how to balance them and link them together, in what style and register to express them, since the solutions to these questions will dictate the extent to which the poem can be seen as reflecting classical epic traditions. The most obvious course for the vernacular poet to follow would have been to privilege warfare at the expense of love, reducing the theme of love to a secondary role and emphasizing the coherence of the theme of war, by creating a major campaign as the backbone of the narrative structure. This is the pattern adopted by Tasso, but it is not the one adopted by any of the poets surveyed in the chapter, nor indeed by Ariosto.Less
This chapter focuses on the themes of love and war in epic poetry. It argues that these principal themes of the romance epic of the early Renaissance are virtually preset. The question facing poets is not what themes to choose, but how to characterize them, how to balance them and link them together, in what style and register to express them, since the solutions to these questions will dictate the extent to which the poem can be seen as reflecting classical epic traditions. The most obvious course for the vernacular poet to follow would have been to privilege warfare at the expense of love, reducing the theme of love to a secondary role and emphasizing the coherence of the theme of war, by creating a major campaign as the backbone of the narrative structure. This is the pattern adopted by Tasso, but it is not the one adopted by any of the poets surveyed in the chapter, nor indeed by Ariosto.
Emily Wilson
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199276301
- eISBN:
- 9780191706011
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199276301.003.0010
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter suggests that the interactions between characters in two Renaissance epics may hint at how we should read the interactions between Renaissance epic and the various traditions on which it ...
More
This chapter suggests that the interactions between characters in two Renaissance epics may hint at how we should read the interactions between Renaissance epic and the various traditions on which it draws. It identifies the complex ways in which echoes of Virgil, in particular, may be joined with recollections of later literature. The chapter focuses on the transformation in Renaissance epic of two moments in Virgil where Aeneas encounters a radically altered figure from his past, who tells him to run away and to pursue his imperial quest elsewhere.Less
This chapter suggests that the interactions between characters in two Renaissance epics may hint at how we should read the interactions between Renaissance epic and the various traditions on which it draws. It identifies the complex ways in which echoes of Virgil, in particular, may be joined with recollections of later literature. The chapter focuses on the transformation in Renaissance epic of two moments in Virgil where Aeneas encounters a radically altered figure from his past, who tells him to run away and to pursue his imperial quest elsewhere.
Jason Lawrence
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780719090882
- eISBN:
- 9781526128348
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719090882.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attention in England focused increasingly on the troubled life of the poet, who came to be regarded as ‘a prototype of the Romantic poet, loving ...
More
During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attention in England focused increasingly on the troubled life of the poet, who came to be regarded as ‘a prototype of the Romantic poet, loving passionately but hopelessly and above his station, ...chained in a lunatic’s cell’. In the fifth chapter the second principal strand of this study traces and analyses the development of such views about Tasso himself, from the earliest English biographical account by Henry Layng in 1748 to the last at the start of the twentieth century. It also examines the many imaginative engagements with aspects of the poet’s legendary biography, such as his apparent madness and prolonged imprisonment in Ferrara as a result of his supposed love for Leonora d’Este, the Duke’s sister, which were to become a prominent feature of English and European responses to him in the nineteenth century. It focuses particularly on Lord Byron’s impassioned ventriloquisation of the Italian poet’s voice in The Lament of Tasso (1817).Less
During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attention in England focused increasingly on the troubled life of the poet, who came to be regarded as ‘a prototype of the Romantic poet, loving passionately but hopelessly and above his station, ...chained in a lunatic’s cell’. In the fifth chapter the second principal strand of this study traces and analyses the development of such views about Tasso himself, from the earliest English biographical account by Henry Layng in 1748 to the last at the start of the twentieth century. It also examines the many imaginative engagements with aspects of the poet’s legendary biography, such as his apparent madness and prolonged imprisonment in Ferrara as a result of his supposed love for Leonora d’Este, the Duke’s sister, which were to become a prominent feature of English and European responses to him in the nineteenth century. It focuses particularly on Lord Byron’s impassioned ventriloquisation of the Italian poet’s voice in The Lament of Tasso (1817).
Lewis Lockwood
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195378276
- eISBN:
- 9780199852376
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195378276.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
Based on documentary and archival research, this book provides a study of the rise of music at a vital center of Italian Renaissance culture, focusing on the patrons and musicians whose efforts gave ...
More
Based on documentary and archival research, this book provides a study of the rise of music at a vital center of Italian Renaissance culture, focusing on the patrons and musicians whose efforts gave Ferrara a primary role in European music during the 15th century. The successive rulers of the Italian city-state, members of the Este dynasty, brought to Ferrara some of the most important composers of the period, including Guillaume Dufay, Johannes Martini, Jacob Obrecht, and Josquin Desprez. Moreover, Ferrara has long been famous as the seat of activity of three of the most important poets of the period — Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso — as well as for its school of painting and manuscript production and illumination. In this book Ferrara, the city-state, steps forward as a major musical center as well.Less
Based on documentary and archival research, this book provides a study of the rise of music at a vital center of Italian Renaissance culture, focusing on the patrons and musicians whose efforts gave Ferrara a primary role in European music during the 15th century. The successive rulers of the Italian city-state, members of the Este dynasty, brought to Ferrara some of the most important composers of the period, including Guillaume Dufay, Johannes Martini, Jacob Obrecht, and Josquin Desprez. Moreover, Ferrara has long been famous as the seat of activity of three of the most important poets of the period — Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso — as well as for its school of painting and manuscript production and illumination. In this book Ferrara, the city-state, steps forward as a major musical center as well.
Peter Mack
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691194004
- eISBN:
- 9780691195353
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691194004.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas
This chapter takes a look at Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532), Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), and The Faerie Queene (1596), which are the recognized epic masterpieces of their eras. They draw in succession ...
More
This chapter takes a look at Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532), Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), and The Faerie Queene (1596), which are the recognized epic masterpieces of their eras. They draw in succession on each other and on a wide range of classical and romance texts, many of them known to the first audiences of these three poems. The chapter investigates the ways in which Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Edmund Spenser used their predecessors and the different effects they achieved from a shared heritage. It examines the ways in which a series of authors used both their immediate predecessors and their sense of a long tradition of epic writing to create something new. The chapter argues that Ariosto aimed to shock and surprise his audience. Tasso reacted to Ariosto by combining a more serious and unified epic on the lines of the Iliad. Spenser's idea of devoting each book to a hero and a virtue presents a structure which is easier to comprehend than Ariosto's, yet looser and more open to surprises than Tasso's.Less
This chapter takes a look at Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532), Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), and The Faerie Queene (1596), which are the recognized epic masterpieces of their eras. They draw in succession on each other and on a wide range of classical and romance texts, many of them known to the first audiences of these three poems. The chapter investigates the ways in which Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Edmund Spenser used their predecessors and the different effects they achieved from a shared heritage. It examines the ways in which a series of authors used both their immediate predecessors and their sense of a long tradition of epic writing to create something new. The chapter argues that Ariosto aimed to shock and surprise his audience. Tasso reacted to Ariosto by combining a more serious and unified epic on the lines of the Iliad. Spenser's idea of devoting each book to a hero and a virtue presents a structure which is easier to comprehend than Ariosto's, yet looser and more open to surprises than Tasso's.
Jason Lawrence (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526125798
- eISBN:
- 9781526141965
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526125798.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter considers Jonathan Richardson’s critical ‘Dissertation’ on Poussin’s painting Tancred and Erminia (c. 1633) as both analysis and ekphrastic representation. It focuses on Richardson’s ...
More
This chapter considers Jonathan Richardson’s critical ‘Dissertation’ on Poussin’s painting Tancred and Erminia (c. 1633) as both analysis and ekphrastic representation. It focuses on Richardson’s keen interest in the artist’s visual interpretations of, and additions to, Tasso’s great Italian epic poem, Gerusalemme liberata (1581). It becomes clear that both the French painter and the English critic know the Italian poem well; it is far less certain, however, whether the intended English readership would have shared similar first-hand knowledge of either the picture or its literary source. Richardson’s paragone of the two forms is intended to emphasise Poussin’s ability ‘to make use of the Advantages This Art has over that of his Competitor’; problematically, however, the pre-eminence of the visual medium in this specific example can only be attested to by means of a sustained verbal comparison of the painting and its poetic source, which ultimately seems to imply a more complex, symbiotic relationship in the encounter between the visual and literary arts than Richardson initially admits.Less
This chapter considers Jonathan Richardson’s critical ‘Dissertation’ on Poussin’s painting Tancred and Erminia (c. 1633) as both analysis and ekphrastic representation. It focuses on Richardson’s keen interest in the artist’s visual interpretations of, and additions to, Tasso’s great Italian epic poem, Gerusalemme liberata (1581). It becomes clear that both the French painter and the English critic know the Italian poem well; it is far less certain, however, whether the intended English readership would have shared similar first-hand knowledge of either the picture or its literary source. Richardson’s paragone of the two forms is intended to emphasise Poussin’s ability ‘to make use of the Advantages This Art has over that of his Competitor’; problematically, however, the pre-eminence of the visual medium in this specific example can only be attested to by means of a sustained verbal comparison of the painting and its poetic source, which ultimately seems to imply a more complex, symbiotic relationship in the encounter between the visual and literary arts than Richardson initially admits.
Susan Mcclary
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520247345
- eISBN:
- 9780520952065
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520247345.003.0011
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
Of all seventeenth-century cultural environments, the court of Louis XIV would seem the most concerned with dictating the terms of social and artistic order. Yet some of the most notable instances of ...
More
Of all seventeenth-century cultural environments, the court of Louis XIV would seem the most concerned with dictating the terms of social and artistic order. Yet some of the most notable instances of tragédie lyrique—Lully's Armide and Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Médée—end with sorceresses taking to the air on dragon carts, breaking through the frame we would expect to contain their energies. “The Dragon Cart” examines the conditions that made these extraordinary gestures and characterizations viable.Less
Of all seventeenth-century cultural environments, the court of Louis XIV would seem the most concerned with dictating the terms of social and artistic order. Yet some of the most notable instances of tragédie lyrique—Lully's Armide and Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Médée—end with sorceresses taking to the air on dragon carts, breaking through the frame we would expect to contain their energies. “The Dragon Cart” examines the conditions that made these extraordinary gestures and characterizations viable.
Dorothy Stringer
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823231478
- eISBN:
- 9780823241088
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823231478.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
All criticism is speculative, both an open-ended inquiry and, as etymology indicates, a reckoning with and through the “seeing” that structures our thinking so fundamentally. Shepherdson describes ...
More
All criticism is speculative, both an open-ended inquiry and, as etymology indicates, a reckoning with and through the “seeing” that structures our thinking so fundamentally. Shepherdson describes narcissism, critical and otherwise, as “deadly,” “disaster,” “catastrophe,” and above all, “trauma.” Freud's examples of such compulsive repetitions included children's games of loss and absence, played over and over, neurotic patients' repetitive acting-out, veterans' recurrent, troubling dreams, and, most importantly for our present concerns, poetry, in a discussion of Tasso that identifies the “moving” quality of his epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata with its figure of a magically repeated wound. Shepherdson notes that the tale of Narcissus is “a story in which blindness and sexual difference are brought together, and a story of punishment as well.”Less
All criticism is speculative, both an open-ended inquiry and, as etymology indicates, a reckoning with and through the “seeing” that structures our thinking so fundamentally. Shepherdson describes narcissism, critical and otherwise, as “deadly,” “disaster,” “catastrophe,” and above all, “trauma.” Freud's examples of such compulsive repetitions included children's games of loss and absence, played over and over, neurotic patients' repetitive acting-out, veterans' recurrent, troubling dreams, and, most importantly for our present concerns, poetry, in a discussion of Tasso that identifies the “moving” quality of his epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata with its figure of a magically repeated wound. Shepherdson notes that the tale of Narcissus is “a story in which blindness and sexual difference are brought together, and a story of punishment as well.”
Mauro Calcagno
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520267688
- eISBN:
- 9780520951525
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520267688.003.0007
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
Chapter 6 shows how, on the one hand, the composer develops his voice as narrator to such a degree that in Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda Monteverdi transforms the epic poetry of Torquato Tasso ...
More
Chapter 6 shows how, on the one hand, the composer develops his voice as narrator to such a degree that in Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda Monteverdi transforms the epic poetry of Torquato Tasso into a multimedia, semistaged piece. On the other hand, Monteverdi overcomes Petrarchism by creating full-fledged and flesh-and-blood characters well beyond the classic Petrarchan “lover.” In this process he adapts for his own purposes the poetics not only of Tasso but also of Giambattista Marino, the quintessential Baroque poet. Monteverdi's creation of fictional worlds is the result of madrigalistic and operatic techniques subsumed under the term focalization, meaning “perspective” or “point of view.” Narrator and characters project a focalizing effect by acquiring a visual dimension through which they see, perceive, and experience the events of a story, making the audience aware of them. Instrumental music also becomes a factor in this process. As a result, madrigal and opera become, in the hands of Monteverdi, multivocal and multifocal, with the potential of being developed as multimedia artworks.Less
Chapter 6 shows how, on the one hand, the composer develops his voice as narrator to such a degree that in Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda Monteverdi transforms the epic poetry of Torquato Tasso into a multimedia, semistaged piece. On the other hand, Monteverdi overcomes Petrarchism by creating full-fledged and flesh-and-blood characters well beyond the classic Petrarchan “lover.” In this process he adapts for his own purposes the poetics not only of Tasso but also of Giambattista Marino, the quintessential Baroque poet. Monteverdi's creation of fictional worlds is the result of madrigalistic and operatic techniques subsumed under the term focalization, meaning “perspective” or “point of view.” Narrator and characters project a focalizing effect by acquiring a visual dimension through which they see, perceive, and experience the events of a story, making the audience aware of them. Instrumental music also becomes a factor in this process. As a result, madrigal and opera become, in the hands of Monteverdi, multivocal and multifocal, with the potential of being developed as multimedia artworks.
Jane E. Everson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780197266502
- eISBN:
- 9780191884221
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266502.003.0008
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This essay explores the changing fortunes of Ariosto’s poem in England in mid- to late eighteenth-century criticism through an examination of select passages of the Letters on Chivalry and Romance, ...
More
This essay explores the changing fortunes of Ariosto’s poem in England in mid- to late eighteenth-century criticism through an examination of select passages of the Letters on Chivalry and Romance, by Bishop Richard Hurd (1762), and a close reading of the introduction, notes and commentaries appended to the two translations published in this period: that of William Huggins (1755) with facing-page text and translation into ottava rima; and that of John Hoole (1783) into English heroic couplets. While Huggins is full of enthusiasm for virtually every aspect of the Furioso, both Hurd and Hoole display a certain ambivalence towards Ariosto and his poem, reflecting the negative views of earlier, especially French, critics, the neo-classical preference for Tasso, and the influence of Dryden on the theory and practice of translation of poetry.Less
This essay explores the changing fortunes of Ariosto’s poem in England in mid- to late eighteenth-century criticism through an examination of select passages of the Letters on Chivalry and Romance, by Bishop Richard Hurd (1762), and a close reading of the introduction, notes and commentaries appended to the two translations published in this period: that of William Huggins (1755) with facing-page text and translation into ottava rima; and that of John Hoole (1783) into English heroic couplets. While Huggins is full of enthusiasm for virtually every aspect of the Furioso, both Hurd and Hoole display a certain ambivalence towards Ariosto and his poem, reflecting the negative views of earlier, especially French, critics, the neo-classical preference for Tasso, and the influence of Dryden on the theory and practice of translation of poetry.