The Chivalric Romance in the Age of Its Neoliberal Reproducibility. The Orlando Furioso Transcodified in Marvel's Iron Man Saga

This article readsthe 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 modelfor com-municating a set of cultural values and socio-political anxieties by using genre-specific topoi and modes of storytelling. Specifically, thisanalysis investigates the transcodification of thiscode from its original con-textual specificityto thetwenty-first century,with a particular focus on contemporary US neoliberal soci-ety. Indeed, this essay interprets Marvel’s Iron Mansaga, 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 romanceas developed in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, both in narrative and ideological terms. The Iron Mansaga 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 interpretationlies in the realiza-tion that technological reproducibility is a crucial aspect of the story and the characterization of the Or-lando Furiosoas well as of the Iron Mansaga and its neoliberal basis.