Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture

Teodolinda Barolini

Published by Fordham University Press 2009

Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture

Teodolinda Barolini

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823237548

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Barolini Teodolinda :

Teodolinda Barolini, past President of the Dante Society of America, is Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian at Columbia University. She is the author of Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy and The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante, and the co-editor, with H. Wayne Storey, of Dante for the New Millennium (Fordham).

Reviews

. . . Its publication is a notable and most welcome event in Italian studies.

Traces the development of Italy's literary tradition in terms of its lyric poets and its 'three crowns': Dante, Petrach, and Boccaccio.

At every step, Barolini reinforces and expands our comprehension of Dante's genius, of his grasp of the past, and of his innovation. She offers measured, informed, and utterly compelling argument that is not controversial for the sake of controversy, but insightful, bold, and relevant. This volume is indispensable.

—Zygmunt Baranski:
A uniquely distinctive critical voice in medieval Italian literary studies: vigorous, sharply intelligent, combative, original, and most of all, honest.

. . .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.

Barolini collects her essays, which are more about what Dante does with material than where he found it.

The essays are informed throughout not only by medievalist erudition but by a lively interest in methodological and theoretical issues, especially in the area of gender. This book's appearance is an important event for Italian and medieval studies. Highly Recommended.

This is an Italianist at the top of her game, and it's an inspiring game to watch.

—Piero Boitani:
A magisterial work, written by one of the foremost Italianists of North America, and one of the best volumes devoted to the birth and development of Italian literary culture on either side of the Atlantic.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Reading Against the Grain: Musings of an Italianist, from the Astral to the Artisanal Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
I. A PHILOSOPHY OF DESIRE
1. Dante and the Lyric Past Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
2. Guittone’s Ora parrà, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
3. Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyric and Autobiographical Context Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	70
4. Medieval Multiculturalism and Dante’s Theology of Hell Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	102
II. CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN INTERTEXTS
5. Why Did Dante Write the Commedia? Dante and the Visionary Tradition Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	125
6. Minos’s Tail: The Labor of Devising Hell (Aeneid 6.431–33 and Inferno 5.1–24) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	132
7. Q: Does Dante Hope for Vergil’s Salvation? A: Why Do We Care? For the Very Reason We Should Not Ask the Question Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	151
8. Arachne, Argus, and St. John: Transgressive Art in Dante and Ovid Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	158
III. ORDERING THE MACROTEXT: TIME AND NARRATIVE
9. Cominciandomi dal principio infino a la fine: Forging Anti-narrative in the Vita nuova Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175
10. The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	193
11. The Wheel of the Decameron Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	224
12. Editing Dante’s Rime and Italian Cultural History: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca . . . Barbi, Contini, Foster-Boyde, De Robertis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	245
IV. GENDER
13. Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron (Decameron 2.9, 2.10, 5.10) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	281
14. Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, and Gender Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	304
15. Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo (With a Brief Excursus on Cecco d’Ascoli) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	333
16. Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrix Loquax Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	360
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	379
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	467

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Pages
- Main content: 496
Keywords: Literary Studies

eBook

Published: August 25, 2009
ISBN: 9780823237548