Dante and the origins of Italian literary culture
"In this book, Teodolinda Barolini explores the sources of Italian literary culture in the figures of its lyric poets and its "three crowns": Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Barolini views the origins of Italian literary culture through four prisms: the ideological/philosophical, the intertextual/multicultural, the structural/formal, and the social. The essays in the first section treat the ideology of love and desire from the early lyric tradition to the Inferno and its antecedents in philosophy and theology. In the second, Barolini focuses on Dante as heir to both the Christian visionary and the classical pagan traditions (with emphasis on Vergil and Ovid). The essays in the third part analyze the narrative character of Dante's Vita nuova, Petrarch's lyric sequence, and Boccaccio's Decameron. Barolini also looks at the cultural implications of the editorial history of Dante's rime and at what sparso versus organico spells in the Italian imaginary. In the section on gender, she argues that the didactic texts intended for women's use and instruction, as explored by Guittone, Dante, and Boccaccio--but not by Petrarch--were more progressive than the courtly style for which the Italian tradition is celebrated. Moving from the lyric origins of the Divine Comedy in "Dante and the Lyric Past" to Petrarch's regressive stance on gender in "Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature"--And encompassing, among others, Giacomo da Lentini, Guido Cavalcanti, and Guittone d'Arezzo--these sixteen essays by one of our leading critics frame the literary culture of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Italy in fresh, illuminating ways that will prove useful and instructive to students and scholars alike."--Publisher's website
Print Book, English, 2006
Fordham University Press, New York, 2006
Aufsatzsammlung
viii, 475 pages ; 23 cm
9780823227037, 9780823227044, 9780823227051, 0823227030, 0823227049, 0823227057
71275597
1. Dante and the lyric past
2. Guittone's Ora parrá, Dante's Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia's anatomy of desire
3. Dante and Cavalcanti (on making distinctions in matters of love) : Inferno 5 in its lyric and autobiographical context
4. Medieval multiculturalism and Dante's theology of hell
5. Why did Dante write the Commedia? Dante and the visionary tradition
6. Minos's tail : the labor of devising hell (Aeneid 6.431-33 and Inferno 5.1-24)
7. Q : Does Dante hope for Vergil's salvation? A : Why do we care? For the very reason we should not ask the question
8. Arachne, Argus, and St. John : transgressive art in Dante and Ovid
9. Cominciandomi dal principio infino a la fine : forging anti-narrative in the Vita nuova
10. The making of a lyric sequence : time and narrative in Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta
11. The wheel of the Decameron
12. Editing Dante's Rime and Italian cultural history : Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca ... Barbi, Contini, Foster-Boyde, De Robertis
13. Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi : toward a sexual poetics of the Decameron (Decameron 2.9, 2.10, 5.10)
14. Dante and Francesca da Rimini : realpolitik, romance, gender
15. Sotto benda : gender in the lyrics of Dante and Guittone d' Arezzo (with a brief excursus on Cecco d'Ascoli)
16. Notes toward a gendered history of Italian literature, with a discussion of Dante's Beatrix Loquax