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Translated here for the first time into English, Sergio Zatti'sThe Quest for Epicis 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 Epicdocuments 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'sOrlando Furioso, written in the early 1500s, and progresses to Tasso'sJerusalem 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.

The era of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, as construed through its political and moral treatises and many of its literary masterpieces, is generally held to be the age of ‘dissimulation,’ just as in art it was the age of shadows and chiaroscuro. But it was a darkness leading towards the light and, ultimately, towards the truth (one need only think of the magnificent works of Caravaggio and Rembrandt). One of the most astute of contemporary observers, Michel de Montaigne, wrote that ‘dissimulation may be counted among the most notable qualities of this century.’¹ Neither virtue nor defect, dissimulation was

1 Whatever the reasons for Ariosto’s decision not to incorporate theCinque cantiinto the body of theOrlando furioso, this fragment, despite its incompleteness, offers an appropriate dramatic setting for the final artistic representation of the chivalric world. There were already clear signs of crisis in the first edition of theFurioso, and it was probably in the narrative and ideological context of that edition that theCinque canticame into being.¹ Other signs of crisis were to mark the more severe physiognomy of the third edition. The pessimistic aspects of the final version of the poem, which caused

1 In theGerusalemme liberata’sopening stanzas, which serve as its protasis, invocation, and dedication, Tasso gathers together a group of characters whose heterogeneous composition deserves emphasis: Canto l’arme pietose e’l capitano che ’l gran sepolcro liberò di Cristo. Molto egli oprò co ’l senno e con la mano, molto soffrì nel glorioso acquisto; e in van l’Inferno vi s’oppose, e in vano s’armò d’Asia e di Libia il popol misto. Il Ciel gli diè favore, e sotto a i santi segni ridusse i suoi compagni erranti. O Musa, tu che di caduchi allori non circondi la fronte in Elicona,

1 An analysis of the narrative form and thematic organization of theFuriosomust recognize the central function of the quest (inchiesta). As the foundational theme for a whole genre, the quest is the transformation of the ancient chronotope (to borrow a term from Bakhtin) of theaventure, so familiar to the French medieval romance and inherited by Italian chivalric literature. Already in the Arthurian romances – and even more prominently in Chrétien’s last texts and in the whole cycle of the search for the Grail – theaventureis progressively framed within thequête: ‘The point of departure from which the