Ariosto and Dante. On the Modeling Function of Some Narrative and Realistic Aspects of the "Comedy"

Abstract

Past, now canonical researches (Segre, Blasucci, Ossola) and important subsequent studies (Zatti, Jossa, Geyer, Stierle et al.) have shown how pervasive the influence of Dante’s Comedy on the Orlando Furioso was, not only from a linguistic, stylistic, and metric perspective, but also on a thematic level as well as in terms of the (often parodically expressed) juxtaposition of divergent “ideologies”. Given the richness of the aspects analyzed so far, we can now ask ourselves whether, for Ariosto, Dante’s Comedy also represented a model for narrative structures and for the system of relationships between text and extratextual reality. By highlighting for the first time the presence and function of Dantean references in the proems of the early cantos of the Orlando Furioso, this contribution shows how Ariosto appropriates precise narrative strategies from the Comedy and thus constructs new structural dynamics that govern the first-person narration and the references to contemporary reality.