Dante and the origins of Italian literary culture / Teodolinda Barolini.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barolini, Teodolinda, 1951-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321--Influence--Italy.

Dante Alighieri.

Italian literature--History and criticism.

Italian literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (484 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Introduction Reading Against the Grain: Musings of an Italianist, from the Astral to the Artisanal

1. Dante and the Lyric Past

2. Guittone’s Ora parrà, 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, and 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

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9786612698453

9780823227105

0823227103

9780823247653

0823247651

9780823241019

0823241017

9781282698451

1282698451

9780823237548

0823237540

9780823227051

0823227057

9781429479189

1429479183

OCLC:

727645677