Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian Renaissance

Compromising the Classics examines the evolution of narrative poetics in three of the canonical poems of the Italian Renaissance,the romance-epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso. Combining cultural criticism with literary analysis, this volume focuses on how these poets renovated the popular genre of romance into a new kind of narrative through their imitation of classical epic, as well as through their imitation of pastoral, satire, history, and to a lesser extent, comedy and tragedy.

To describe the poetics of allusion across different literary traditions, Dennis Looney introduces a new critical category―compromise―which suggests not only the blending of traditions but also the need to
reevaluate traditions once they have been
brought together.

Looney illustrates how the three great Renaissance poets from Ferrara are products of a cultural milieu which literary historians have typically ignored. Through these poets, who sought to incorporate details of classical literature into their idiom, Looney analyzes the impact of Renaissance humanism on popular culture.

Specifically, the book tracks the way in which Ariosto's allusions to certain classical works shaped the patterning of his Orlando Furioso (1532), so that from one perspective it resembles a classical narrative, while from
another, a medieval romance. Ariosto's
intertextual allusions to classical sources often promoted a reevaluation of those models in terms of his own vernacular tradition and affected how his contemporary readers responded to classical literature. The same can be said of Tasso and Boiardo. Indeed, one of the most important contributions of Compromising the Classics is the introduction and illumination of Boiardo's
work, about which critics have said virtually
nothing. In contextualizing this unwarranted
neglect, Looney notes both Ariosto's stunning literary success and Tasso's theoretical positions as primary contributors to the eclipse of Boiardo.

Finally, Looney explores the historical reception of hte c lassic and condcludes that the demarcation among traditions―classical,medieval, modern―is not nearly as clear as we might like to think. In effect, there exists a compromise.

Dennis Looney is an associate professor of Italian and the director of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.