What is "Ariostan" in Ariosto: Considerations on Irony and the Supernatural in the "Orlando furioso" (and how we talk about them)

Abstract

Recent Ariosto scholarship focused extensively on the interrelated questions of irony and the supernatural in the Orlando Furioso. Especially influential has been the idea of the “burial” of Ariostan irony in the sixteenth-century. More or less consciously repressed in the first part of the reception history of the Orlando Furioso, irony would be rediscovered only several centuries later, putting us today in a better position than the one that Ariosto’s contemporaries had to appreciate the strategies of the Furioso for producing irony and the specific form of the supernatural in the poem – that is, to highlight the Ariostan elements in Ariosto. This essay reconsiders the problem of the specificity of the Orlando Furioso from the points of view of both the textual features of the poem and the way in which these characteristics have been noted in the reception history, and it aims at showing that the recognition of specific aspects of the text does not necessarily coincide with the adequacy of the theoretical tools that are used for their description.