The Orlando furioso: a stoic comedy Free PDF book by Clare Carroll





It seems to me rather than Ariosto's work on the poem— through twenty-five years and three editions— attests to the poet's perseverance. Carne-Ross's reading, though extremely suggestive, did not meet the critical challenge of reading the whole poem. To focus narrowly on one part of the poem or, worse, to lop off the last fifteen countries in the face of such an ancient notion as the wholeness of the work of art, a notion adopted by New Criticism.My attempt to read the entire poem is in this respect more thoroughly New Critical than the approach of any of these critics. It is also more thoroughly historical. In literary-historical matters, Greene is observant and careful, but when it comes to connecting the text with a larger moral philosophical framework, his readings are anachronistic. I particularly wince at the progressive Whig notion of history that informs his portrayal of the syncretist and skeptical Christian humanist Ariosto as an enlightened New York Times reader and liberal atheist. More historically minded critics, such as Durling and later Saccone, were interested in interpreting the poem in relation to specifically Renaissance concepts of poetics and consequently in considering the poem as a whole rather than a series of fragments. 6 For Saccone and Durling, the poem expressed a total harmony, however subtly shifting between "Viaggio" and "Spazio," however paradoxically based on "the reader's accepting the [poem's] manner of not totalizing reality but of being critical of it." 7 C. P. Brand analyzed the structure of the FuriosoAuthor:Clare Carroll Publication Date:1997