Ariosto in the Machine Age

Ariosto in the Machine Age reimagines reception theory through the modern afterlife of a Renaissance literary icon.

Alessandro Giammei is an assistant professor of Italian studies at Yale University.

"Ariosto’s unlikely and far-reaching consequence for Italian modernism finds in Alessandro Giammei’s hands a study as theoretically adventurous as it is philologically rigorous. A keen reader of images and a thinker on a grand scale, Giammei tunnels between early modern epic and the twentieth-century avant-garde with incisiveness and grace."

Jo Ann Cavallo, Professor of Italian, Columbia University:

"This tour de force situates Ariosto – or rather, the myth of Ariosto – front and centre in modern Italian culture while also alerting readers to the ambiguities and ideologies behind the construction of any iconic figure. In tracing the Orlando Furioso’s ‘modern afterlife,’ Alessandro Giammei offers new ways of reading the artists, movements, and media that defined (and sometimes instrumentalized) culture in twentieth-century Italy."

Ita Mac Carthy, Professor of Italian, Durham University :

"Alessandro Giammei’s book offers a kaleidoscopic study of Ariosto’s early twentieth-century reception and a novel conceptualization of Italy in the machine age. Adept at identifying casual and often indirect encounters with the Orlando Furioso, it explores how such encounters generate – among other things – Futurist art, Ferrarese fascism, and experimental film. Skilful and scholarly, it fills in with glorious detail a significant gap in our understanding of Ariosto’s afterlives."