The book analyzes the history of the theory of epic, with a focus on Torquato Tasso and the issue of unity—how many actions the plot should have, what an action is, the relationship between episodes and the main narrative thread, the motivation behind the characters’ actions. The topic is of paramount importance, since unity has been the defining quality of epic vis-à-vis competing genres such as the chivalric romance (and later the novel) for centuries, respectively characterized by “unity/variety, . . . collective war/individual adventure, . . . [and] linearity of the events/deviations” (16, translations mine). Confalonieri's analysis ranges from Aristotle and Horace (chapter 1) to the Italian sixteenth century (chapter 2), from Hegel to Lukács and Bakhtin (chapter 3). The critic argues that the debate around unity has been flawed: theories of epic have often been biased because they have been developed with the goal of defending or attacking other genres; action has always been an ill-defined term; theorists contradicted themselves or misread previous theories; the theory proved insufficient to describe epic poems. In chapter 4, Confalonieri proposes that Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, more than other poems, attempted to address such contradictions, and thus can function as a “provocation for a new theory of heroic action, and thus for a new theory of epic” (29).

Confalonieri's examination is deep and subtle, combining an impressive command of the secondary bibliography with fine intellectual work, especially when he dissects the primary texts and tests their logic and consistency. The analysis often reveals how epic has been unduly reduced to a monolithic idea (a genre possessing absolute unity, where no actions are ambiguous or casual) because it has been theorized in opposition to other genres. Within this history, Hegel offers us more nuanced views if we reconstruct his reflections on action through the most recent philological studies on his lectures on aesthetics and other Hegelian texts.

Such deep engagement with complex authors beyond the Renaissance is remarkable, and demonstrates that Renaissance poetics can benefit from being read from the perspective of subsequent eras: we can see clearly what Renaissance poetics were only able to approximate; we can understand their contradictions and propose solutions to their problems; and we can thus appreciate their complexity without falling into the commonplaces that have characterized reflections on epic for centuries.

This is indeed accomplished in the chapter on the Liberata. The poem has often been read in terms of polarities, from Caretti to Zatti: the multiplicity, the appeal, the romance of elements such as pagan warriors and the personal motivations of Christian knights has been opposed to epic elements—obedience to Captain Goffredo, duty—that allow Goffredo to conquer Jerusalem and Tasso to conclude the poem and instruct the readers. Instead, Confalonieri argues that the romance element is never suppressed, the ambiguity is not resolved, and characters keep following their private motivations until the end of the poem, all the while contributing to the collective purpose of the army. The concept of unity emerging from several theoretical formulations of epic, from the classics to the romantics, structurally needs what has been labeled as multiplicity, and thus we should reconsider reading the poem in terms of a duality between epic and romance. Unity remains mostly a desire.

This way the book succeeds in demonstrating how it is possible to conceive a new reading of the Liberata that goes beyond the labels commonly used by virtually all critics of Tasso and early modern epic. The analysis is so detailed, and rightly open and problematizing rather than forcing any conclusions, that it leaves space for discussions on the deeper meanings of unity (the vision of the world, of history, of providence, and of the ultimate goals of poetry underlying it) informed by the new theory of epic proposed in the book. These are perhaps questions for other works and maybe other critics, for whom this book will be an unavoidable interlocutor.