Table of Contents

Introduction
1: Approaches to the Romance Epic
Texts and Contexts
2: Prehistory of the Romance Epic in Italy
3: (Re-)Reading the Classics
4: Petrarch and Boccaccio: Starting Points, Turning Points, and Blind Alleys
5: Books, Readers, and Reception
New Perspectives New Readings
6: Mars and Venus - Love and War
7: The Figure of the Hero
8: The One and the Many: Constructing the Plot
9: The Paradoxical Success of the Romance Epic. Ariosto and Beyond
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Jane Everson is Senior Lecturer, Royal Holloway University of London

Reviews

Jane Everson's book, the result of several years of study and research, constitutes a significant, stimulating, and valuable contribution to our understanding of Italian romance epic in the age of humanism. Renaissance Quarterly This is an excellent book that carefully recapitulates much earlier scholarship, while adding to it throughout. It makes a convincing case for Boccaccio's foundational position in the romance epic tradition and for the necessity of giving more emphasis to the period between Boccaccio and the generation of Pulci and Boiardo. Modern Language Review This admirable book effectively analyses texts and their contexts, insists on the difficulties the romance epic presents, and greatly enriches our understanding of this perplexing, yet undeniably appealing, genre. Matthew Treherne, Times Literary Supplement