SOURCE: Bellamy, Elizabeth. “Alcina's Revenge: Reassessing Irony and Allegory in the Orlando furioso.” Annali D'Italianistica 12 (1994): 61-74.

In the following essay, Bellamy considers the ways in which Orlando furioso both conforms to European categories of allegory and epic and subverts its own allegorical and epic genres through ironic commentary.

To place an epic within its European context is not always to discuss such matters as its influence on or borrowings from other European epics. With this in mind, I would like to begin my discussion of Ariosto's Orlando furioso with a brief consideration of what it might mean to talk about Virgil's Aeneid in a European context. In his The Allegorical Epic, Michael Murrin powerfully summarizes the Aeneid as having established “the great model for creative allegory in the West” (23). In other words, the Aeneid becomes fully “European” (or “Western”) at the site of allegory: only through allegory (as...