Narrative self-consciousness of the marvelous in Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso

The broad aim of the thesis is to explore the marvelous as a problem of narrative self-consciousness in literary theory and in the works of four major authors. The introductory chapter provides a critique of the marvelous in recent studies on the fantastic, the literary program of the French surrealists, and, above all, the Poetics of Aristotle. In the following four chapters, I investigate the ways in which the marvelous is treated in the narratives of Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso. For purposes of clarity and focus, I have structured each of these four chapters initially around a single episode from Virgil's Aeneid, the Polydorus episode, which Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso each shaped and re-shaped in their poems. My topics include: (1) Virgil's use of the marvels as the means by which he reveals himself to be highly ambivalent about the status of his poem's source of meaning; (2) the fulfillment of Virgil's marvels in Dante's Commedia; (3) the marvelous as an expression of the desire for totality in Ariosto's Furioso; (4) the problematic relationship of the individual to the community in Tasso's treatment of the marvelous in the Liberata.