‘Orlando Furioso, cinema and the challenge of fiction’ A Talk by Dr Stefano Jossa

Italian School of Languages, Literatures & Cultures

The Moore Institute Presents;

Stefano Jossa, Royal Holloway

Orlando Furioso, cinema and the challenge of fiction

Since C. S. Lewis famously compared Tolkien’s imagination to Ariosto’s on the blurb of the first edition of The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), the linking between Orlando Furioso, Tolkien’s trilogy, and cinema can easily be established and would prove a fruitful one. This paper will explore Orlando Furioso’s presence in film productions from the 1980s with the aim to investigate further the suitability of Ariosto’s masterpiece to contemporary fiction-making processes.

Stefano Jossa is Reader in Italian Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has authored books on Ariosto (La fantasia e la memoria. Intertestualità ariostesche, Liguori 1996; Ariosto, il Mulino 2009), the Italian Renaissance (Rappresentazione e scrittura. La crisi delle forme poetiche rinascimentali (1540-1560), Vivarium 1996; La fondazione di un genere. Il poema eroico tra Ariosto e Tasso, Carocci 2001) and Italian national identity expressed through literarture (L’Italia letteraria, il Mulino, 2006; Un paese senza eroi. L’Italia da Jacopo Ortis a Montalbano, Laterza, 2013). In 2017 he hold the De Sanctis Chair at the Polytechnic (ETH) of Zurich (Switzerland) and was Visiting Professor at the Università degli Studi di Parma (Italy).