The Choice of Odysseus: Homeric Ethics in Renaissance Epic and Opera [Hardcover]

The Choice of Odysseusdemonstrates how theOdysseyprovided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethics for their age. Sarah Van der Laan reconstructs Renaissance readings of theOdysseyby Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Monteverdi, and Milton to recover a powerful Renaissance tradition of Odyssean epic.The Choice of Odysseusdemonstrates how theOdysseyprovided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethicstools for living developed in poetryto navigate the challenges of their age. As they endured schisms, ruptures, and failures of ideals, readers and poets turned to theOdysseyfor narratives of recovery and aftermath. Sarah Van der Laan reconstructs Renaissance readings of theOdysseyfrom myriad sources. Situating major works by Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Monteverdi, and Milton in these Odyssean contexts, she recovers a powerful Renaissance tradition of Odyssean epic. Renaisance poets adopted theOdysseyas an epic model that supplements and even opposes the Virgilian epic model of conquest and imperial foundation. For Renaissance readers and authors, theOdysseyrenders heroic other kinds of lived experience: the necessity of facing the world and its challenges with only human wisdom and reason; the ability to integrate traumatic detours and reversals into a vision of a successful and accomplished self; the recovery of a private life and personal desires painfully suspended for public service. Emphasizing marriage, reconciliation, homecoming, and the return to private life and private desires as suitably heroic matter for epic and powerful conventions for narrative and poetic closure, the RenaissanceOdysseyand the epics and operas it inspired confer a uniquely heroic status on experience for men and women alike.Introduction1. Speaking with Homer: Authorizing Conversations and Dream Visions in Petrarch and Poliziano2. Ariosto's FracturedlÓú