Ariosto, Ludovico | Albert Russell Ascoli (essay date 1987)
Albert Russell Ascoli (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: Ascoli, Albert Russell. “Critical Readings of the Orlando Furioso.” In Ariosto's Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 43-120. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.
[In the following excerpt, Ascoli documents the interplay of influence between Renaissance texts, noting the treatment of Hercules in Orlando furioso.]
The first impulse of this reader and this reading of Orlando Furioso is formalist: a rarely repressed tendency to the pleasures of close textual analysis. Nonetheless, recent critical events have made it very difficult to move directly to a thematic and/or structural interpretation of the poem's treatment of human selfhood. The last twenty years have seen the development of strong concepts of intertextuality, along with, more recently still, the emergence of a modified, “new,” historicism. A literary text, we feel...
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