SOURCE: Verdicchio, Massimo. “Concerning Ariosto's Modernity: Alcina's Case.” In Imagining Culture: Essays in Early Modern History and Literature, edited by Jonathan Hart, pp. 151-64. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996.

In the following essay, Verdicchio questions whether the use of allegory and irony in the Alcina episode of the Furioso renders Ariosto's work modern or postmodern.

The issue of modernity both in the case of Ariosto and of today's theories of poetics seems an outdated question. This is so, not only because we have no trouble with the notion of Ariosto's modernity, which ever since its publication was never in doubt, but because to speak of modernity in the age of postmodernity seems redundant and unproductive. Yet, in speaking of what in Ariosto still makes it present to us, are we being modern or postmodern? The vertigo of this type of questioning is, on the one hand...