Imagining Narrative in Tasso: Revisiting Erminia

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.