Download or read book The Decameron Eighth Day in Perspective written by William Robins and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Divided into ten days of ten novellas each, Boccaccio’s Decameron is one of the literary gems of the fourteenth century. The Decameron Eighth Day in Perspective is an interpretive guide to the stories of the text’s Day Eight – a day dedicated to tales of tricks and practical jokes. By drawing on literary precursors such as fabliaux, epic, philosophy, exempla, Dante’s Commedia, and scripture, and by meditating on the dynamics of civic engagement in fourteenth-century Florence, Boccaccio develops in these stories of jests a self-consciously literary representation of the Florentine social imaginary. The essays in this volume, all written by prominent scholars, survey previous scholarship and open up new cultural and historical perspectives on Boccaccio’s sophisticated art of storytelling. They analyze both the literary sources that Boccaccio’s comic narratives transform, as well as the political, legal, and ethical contexts with which they engage. Each contributor tackles a single tale, yet their essays also register major themes and concerns that recur throughout Day Eight, allowing for close connections among the essays.
Download or read book Decameron Eighth Day in Perspective written by William Robins and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories about pranks figure prominently in Boccaccio's Decameron. This book explores Boccaccio's poetics of repetition, accumulation, and contiguity in Day Eight, a day rich in tales of practical jokes.
Download or read book The Decameron Ninth Day in Perspective written by Simone Marchesi and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ninth Day of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron is significant both for numerological and structural reasons. Whether we consider the Decameron as reproducing an itinerary toward the attainment of virtue or following other possible interpretive schematics, Day Nine remains a liminal moment of pause before the inception of the final stories dedicated to the highest civic virtues of liberality and magnificence. This collection is comprised of extensive and rigorous essays by leading experts in the field of Boccaccio studies and medieval literature, shedding new critical light on the Ninth Day. The volume incorporates a multitude of disciplinary perspectives including literary studies, visual arts, political history, and gender studies. Taking a holistic approach, the contributors to the volume trace the dense and multi-layered web of interrelations between the narrative units and the rest of the Decameron. Connections between individual stories are highlighted and interactions between Day Nine and its counterparts in the book are analysed. In doing so, The Decameron Ninth Day in Perspective synthesizes existing scholarship but also opens up new horizons for future work.
Download or read book The Decameron First Day in Perspective written by Elissa B. Weaver and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2004-12-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is the best known and most read work in Italian literature next to Dante's Divine Comedy. In the tradition of Lectura Dantis, the practice of story-by-story critical readings of Dante's work, Elissa Weaver has collected essays from some of the most prominent American Boccaccio scholars to provide critical readings of the Decameron Proem, Introduction, and the ten stories that constitute the first of the ten 'days' of storytelling. The first of the twelve essays opens the volume with a consideration of the Proem, demonstrating the importance of Boccaccio's literary subtexts (Ovidian and Dantean) for understanding his poetics. The second essay, on the Introduction, discusses the title of the work and the framing tale. The remaining ten contributions treat in detail each story, examining the literary, ethical, and social concerns embodied in the short narratives and in the context provided by the comments and discussions of the story-tellers, and exploring the intertextual relations within the Decameron and with sources and analogues. This inaugural book in a new series of critical essays on the Decameron will provide an important guide to reading the complex series of narratives that constitute the opening of the Decameron and will serve as a guide to reading the entire work.
Download or read book The Decameron Sixth Day in Perspective written by David Lummus and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sixth Day of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron marks a new beginning. Its first story is the structural centre of the one hundred tales and signals the start of the day’s reflection on the power of the word as the fundamental building block of human communication. This collection gathers together readings of each of the ten stories in Day Six of the Decameron – the shortest of the entire work. Featuring a diverse group of literary scholars whose expertise is not limited to Boccaccio studies, the collection offers both comprehensive accounts of the tales and new interpretations of their significance. A major contribution to the study of the Decameron, it will also serve as an excellent starting point for new readers of Boccaccio’s masterpiece. The readings demonstrate how Boccaccio engaged in rethinking or elaborating on the heritage of Western literature and thought, including the Bible; the works of Dante; the Roman literary, rhetorical, and legal tradition; the writings of the Church Fathers; and the ideas of scholastic theologians. These lecturae employ a range of methodologies that account for both historical and theoretical issues in their engagement with Boccaccio's poetic and ethical project in the Decameron.
Download or read book Law and Mimesis in Boccaccio s Decameron written by Justin Steinberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Boccaccio's time, the Italian city-state began to take on a much more proactive role in prosecuting crime – one which superseded a largely communitarian, private approach. The emergence of the state-sponsored inquisitorial trial indeed haunts the legal proceedings staged in the Decameron. How, Justin Steinberg asks, does this significant juridical shift alter our perspective on Boccaccio's much-touted realism and literary self-consciousness? What can it tell us about how he views his predecessor, Dante: perhaps the world's most powerful inquisitorial judge? And to what extent does the Decameron shed light on the enduring role of verisimilitude and truth-seeming in our current legal system? The author explores these and other literary, philosophical, and ethical questions that Boccaccio raises in the Decameron's numerous trials. The book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval and early modern studies, literary theory and legal history.
Download or read book Boccaccio and Exemplary Literature written by Olivia Holmes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first monograph to provide a comprehensive interpretation of the Decameron's response to classical and medieval didactic traditions. Olivia Holmes unearths the rich variety of Boccaccio's sources, ranging across Aesopic fables, narrative collections of Islamicate origin, sermon-stories and saints' lives, and compilations of historical anecdotes. Examining the Decameron's sceptical and sexually permissive contents in relation to medieval notions of narrative exemplarity, the study also considers how they intersect with current critical assertions of fiction's power to develop empathy and emotional intelligence. Holmes argues that Boccaccio provides readers with the opportunity to exercise both what the ancients called 'Ethics,' and our contemporaries call 'Theory of Mind.' This account of a vast tradition of tale collections and its provocative analysis of their workings will appeal to scholars of Italian literature and medieval studies, as well as to readers interested in evolutionary understandings of storytelling.
Download or read book Reconsidering Boccaccio written by Olivia Holmes and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconsidering Boccaccio explores the exceptional social, geographic, and intellectual range of the Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio, his dialogue with voices and traditions that surrounded him, and the way that his legacy illuminates the interconnectivity of numerous cultural networks.
Download or read book Blurred Boundaries and Deceptive Dichotomies in Pre Modern Texts and Images written by Dafna Nissim and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-12-18 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays focuses on the way blurred boundaries are represented in pre-modern texts and visual art and how they were received and perceived by their audiences: readers, listeners, and viewers. According to the current understanding that opposing cognitive categories that are so common in modern thinking do not apply to pre-modern mentalities, we argue that individuals in medieval and pre-modern societies did not necessarily consider sacred and secular, male and female, real and fictional, and opposing emotions as absolute dichotomies. The contributors to the present collection examine a wide range of cultural artifacts – literary texts, wall paintings, sculptures, jewelry, manuscript illustrations, and various objects as to what they reflect regarding the dominant perceptual system – the network of beliefs, worldviews, presumptions, values, and norms of viewing/reading/hearing different from modern epistemology strongly predicated on the binary nature of things and people. The essays suggest that analyzing pre-modern cultural works of art or literature in light of reception theory can lead to a better understanding of how those cultural products influenced individuals and impacted their thoughts and actions.
Download or read book Boccaccio s Florence written by Elsa Filosa and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known as the author of the Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio is a key figure in Italian literature. In the mid-fourteenth century, however, Boccaccio was also deeply involved in the politics of Florence and the extent of his involvement steered and inspired his work as a writer. Boccaccio’s Florence explores the financial, political, and social turbulence of Florence at this time, as well as the major players in literary and political circles, to understand the complex ways they emerged in Boccaccio’s writing. Based on extensive archival research and close reading of Boccaccio’s works, the book aims to recover the dynamics of the Florentine conspiracy of 1360 and how this event affected Boccaccio’s writing, arguing that his works reveal clear references to this episode when read in light of the reconstructed historical context. In this rich and textured picture of the man in his time, Elsa Filosa documents a microhistory of connections and interconnections and offers new, more political and historically imbedded readings of Boccaccio’s seminal works.
Download or read book Gendering the Renaissance written by Meredith K. Ray and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-14 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume revisit the Italian Renaissance to rethink spaces thought to be defined and certain: from the social spaces of convent, court, or home, to the literary spaces of established genres such as religious plays or epic poetry. Repopulating these spaces with the women who occupied them but have often been elided in the historical record, the essays also remind us to ask what might obscure our view of texts and archives, what has remained marginal in the texts and contexts of early modern Italy and why. The contributors, suggesting new ways of interrogating gendered discourses of genre, identities, and sanctity, offer a complex picture of gender in early modern Italian literature and culture. Read in dialogue with one another, their pieces provide a fascinating survey of currents in gender studies and early modern Italian studies and point to exciting future directions in these fields.
Download or read book The Decameron written by Giovanni Boccaccio and published by BoD - Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-07-07 with total page 1040 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the time of a devastating pandemic, seven women and three men withdraw to a country estate outside Florence to give themselves a diversion from the death around them. Once there, they decide to spend some time each day telling stories, each of the ten to tell one story each day. They do this for ten days, with a few other days of rest in between, resulting in the 100 stories of the Decameron. The Decameron was written after the Black Plague spread through Italy in 1348. Most of the tales did not originate with Boccaccio; some of them were centuries old already in his time, but Boccaccio imbued them all with his distinctive style. The stories run the gamut from tragedy to comedy, from lewd to inspiring, and sometimes all of those at once. They also provide a detailed picture of daily life in fourteenth-century Italy.
Download or read book Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-05-29 with total page 932 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Older research on the premodern world limited its focus on the Church, the court, and, more recently, on urban space. The present volume invites readers to consider the meaning of rural space, both in light of ecocritical readings and social-historical approaches. While previous scholars examined the figure of the peasant in the premodern world, the current volume combines a large number of specialized studies that investigate how the natural environment and the appearance of members of the rural population interacted with the world of the court and of the city. The experience in rural space was important already for writers and artists in the premodern era, as the large variety of scholarly approaches indicates. The present volume signals how much the surprisingly close interaction between members of the aristocratic and of the peasant class determined many literary and art-historical works. In a surprisingly large number of cases we can even discover elements of utopia hidden in rural space. We also observe how much the rural world was a significant element already in early-medieval mentality. Moreover, as many authors point out, the impact of natural forces on premodern society was tremendous, if not catastrophic.
Download or read book The Decameron written by Giovanni Boccaccio and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A group of escapees from plague-ridden Florence pass the time by telling tales of romance in this landmark of medieval literature. Features 25 of the original 100 stories. J. M. Rigg translation.
Download or read book The Pleasant Nights Volume 2 written by Don Beecher and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2012-10-19 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned today for his contribution to the rise of the modern European fairy tale, Giovan Francesco Straparola (c. 1480–c. 1557) is particularly known for his dazzling anthology The Pleasant Nights. Originally published in Venice in 1550 and 1553, this collection features seventy-three folk stories, fables, jests, and pseudo-histories, including nine tales we might now designate for ‘mature readers’ and seventeen proto-fairy tales. Nearly all of these stories, including classics such as ‘Puss in Boots,’ made their first ever appearance in this collection; together, the tales comprise one of the most varied and engaging Renaissance miscellanies ever produced. Its appeal sustained it through twenty-six editions in the first sixty years. This full critical edition of The Pleasant Nights presents these stories in English for the first time in over a century. The text takes its inspiration from the celebrated Waters translation, which is entirely revised here to render it both more faithful to the original and more sparkishly idiomatic than ever before. The stories are accompanied by a rich sampling of illustrations, including originals from nineteenth-century English and French versions of the text. As a comprehensive critical and historical edition, these volumes contain far more information on the stories than can be found in any existing studies, literary histories, or Italian editions of the work. Donald Beecher provides a lengthy introduction discussing Straparola as an author, the nature of fairy tales and their passage through oral culture, and how this phenomenon provides a new reservoir of stories for literary adaptation. Moreover, the stories all feature extensive commentaries analysing not only their themes but also their fascinating provenances, drawing on thousands of analogue tales going back to ancient Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic stories. Immensely entertaining and readable, The Pleasant Nights will appeal to anyone interested in fairy tales, ancient stories, and folk creations. Such readers will also enjoy Beecher’s academically solid and erudite commentaries, which unfold in a manner as light and amusing as the stories themselves.
Download or read book The Trickster written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an examination of the use of the trickster in classic literary works.
Download or read book Place Space and Landscape in Medieval Narrative written by Laura L. Howes and published by Tenn Studies Literature. This book was released on 2007 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection contains essays from thirteen authors, on topics ranging from an Old English transfiguration homily, to Galbert of Bruges, Marie de France's lais, Chaucer's gardens, Boccaccio's Decameron, and others. In each of these chapters, analyses of space map a variety of ways medieval narratives encoded meaning. In some, lost historical associations are uncovered. In others, a new way of theorizing space-even seeing bodies and minds as spaces to be imagined or marked-leads to interpretations that add significantly to our understanding of medieval narrative art. In still others, broadly political and ideological concerns find expression in the spatial world.
