Divided in two different parts – the first theoretical, the second devoted to a reading of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata and, regarding one of its most important episodes, Gerusalemme Conquistata –, the research aims to rethink the inherited concept of “epic” as literary genre. In the first part, which embraces a vast area of critical thinking, from Aristotle to Bakhtin, through debates about poetics in the sixteenth century and then through other crucial figures such as Hegel and Lukács, this study tries to show how the concept of “epic” was built as opposed to other literary genres, causing a quite misleading image of the “epic” itself. Aristotle, for example, studied the epic from the point of view of tragedy: this forced him to look in epic for something that the genre could not have easily been (a similar distortion, in sixteenth century and in nineteeth and twentieth centuries, was produced by the opposition between “epic” and “romance” on the one hand, and “epic” and “novel” on the other). Therefore, a today reader is bound to use “epic” in a sense which is all but neutral, and this could affect the understandings of the texts that are considered “epic”. The second part consists in fact in a reading of Tasso’s epic, trying to discover an incoherence between the text and the concept of genre that critics usually adopts to read it. Combining the theoretical results of the first part with the close-reading of the second, this research aims on one side to show a partially new concept of epic, on the other to understand Tasso’s texts – both Liberata and Conquistata – from a different perspective, moving the contradictions that affect them from the opposition between “epic” and “romance” inside the “epic” itself
