Renaissance Epic: Camões, Ercilla, Tasso

Undergraduate / Graduate

Due to the prestige and cultural ascendancy of its classical models, epic was considered the highest literary genre of the sixteenth-century repertoire, which forced Renaissance authors of epic poetry to explicitly compete against their illustrious predecessors and among themselves. This provides a perfect basis to study some mechanisms of textual production in Renaissance poetry, but it will also help us to raise issues around the European (and global) circulation of literary goods, cultural competition, the relation between epic, nation, and empire, or the contested place of epic among the constitutive discourses of colonialism. We will read three major Renaissance epic poems written and distributed in the same years: Alonso de Ercilla's The Araucaniad (1569-1590), Luís de Camões's The Lusiads (1572), and Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1581).