Ariosto in the Machine Age

"""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."" - Ita Mac Carthy, Professor of Italian, Durham 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."" - Ara H. Merjian, Professor of Italian Studies, New York 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."" - Jo Ann Cavallo, Professor of Italian, Columbia University"