The Chivalric Romance in the Age of its Neoliberal Reproducibility: The Orlando Furioso Transcodified in Marvel’s Iron Man Saga
This article reads the literary genre of chivalric romance—those prose or verse narratives popular in the courts of Early Modern Europe recounting the heroic deeds of knights-errant—as a code: a model for communicating a set of cultural values and socio-political anxieties by using genre-specific to...
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| Formato: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2023 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Universidad de Alcalá (UAH) |
| Repositorio: | e_Buah Biblioteca Digital Universidad de Alcalá |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ebuah.uah.es:10017/59878 |
| Acesso em linha: | http://hdl.handle.net/10017/59878 https://dx.doi.org/10.37536/reden.2023.5.2184 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Superhero MCU Ludovico Ariosto Chivalric romance Renaissance Avengers Historia Antropología Literatura History Anthropology Literature |
| Resumo: | This article reads the literary genre of chivalric romance—those prose or verse narratives popular in the courts of Early Modern Europe recounting the heroic deeds of knights-errant—as a code: a model for communicating a set of cultural values and socio-political anxieties by using genre-specific topoi and modes of storytelling. Specifically, this analysis investigates the transcodification of this code from its original contextual specificity to the twenty-first century, with a particular focus on contemporary US neoliberal society. Indeed, this essay interprets Marvel’s Iron Man saga, including the Avengers’ chapters, as an instance of the latest stage of American exceptionalism, here understood as imbricated in the neoliberal society. This reading is built upon the hypothesis that the Avengers’ adventures may be viewed as a twenty-first century adaptation of the chivalric romance as developed in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, both in narrative and ideological terms. The Iron Man saga is representative of and conducive to the American contemporary political set of values as the latest developments of the chivalric romance were of and to the Renaissance sensitivity in the courts of Northern Italy. A key facet of this interpretation lies in the realization that technological reproducibility is a crucial aspect of the story and the characterization of the Orlando Furioso as well as of the Iron Man saga and its neoliberal basis. |
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