In The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic: Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso, Andrea Moudarres, professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at UCLA, examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance to reveal that all forms of hostility consistently arise from within political or religious entities. In Dante’s Divina Commedia, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, all forms of enmity are internal, taking the form of tyranny, betrayal, and civil discord. Moudarres reads these works in the context of historical and political patterns, demonstrating that there was little distinction between public and private spheres in Renaissance Italy, and thus there was little differentiation between personal and political enemies.
Andrea Moudarres, The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic: Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso (University of Delaware Press, 2019), recipient of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies.
For more information, please click here.