Imagining Narrative in Tasso: Revisiting Erminia

Abstract

Simile plays a far more fundamental role in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata than has generally been acknowledged, exemplary of what Tasso would refer to in his Discorsi del poema eroico as the "parola pellegrina." "Imagining Narrative in Tasso" brings together one of the key similes of the poem – the comparison of the fleeing Erminia to a hunted deer at the end of Canto 6 - to the role of Erminia as a pellegrina . Like figurative language itself, Erminia mediates between the "real" world of the poem’s Crusade narrative and the allusive world of the poetic imagination, giving rise to the experience of maraviglia among the poem’s characters and readers alike. In this she is not unlike the narrator, who also defines himself as a peregrino errante in the Liberata ’s exordium.

(Dis)placing the foreign in early modern Europe: The example of Tasso's Gierusalemme

“… 6. See Klopp (1979) for parallels between Tasso's remarks on words he calls “peregrine” and the characters in the Liberata . Klopp focuses on the more secular meanings of the pilgrim, whereas I have argued elsewhere for the religious significance of the word as well (Tylus, 2012). …”