Gender and Genealogy in Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata

Using feminist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructionist approaches to Torquato Tasso's 1581 Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), this book argues that Tasso explored alternate modes of writing and reading by reflecting on the genealogical tales of his non-Christian women characters, Clorinda, Erminia, and Armida. They permit Tasso to explore what it might mean to ask an alternate series of questions about one's relation to the father. By examining the interpretive and ethical questions that rise from the problematic genealogies of Tasso's orphan daughters, we arrive at a better understanding of the relation between the poem's dominant ideology, on one hand, and the stories that it seeks to suspend and displace on the other.