Download or read book Decameron and the Philosophy of Storytelling written by Richard Francis Kuhns and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this creative and engaging reading, Richard Kuhns explores the ways in which Decameron'ssexual themes lead into philosophical inquiry, moral argument, and aesthetic and literary criticism. As he reveals the stories' many philosophical insights and literary pleasures, Kuhns also examines Decameronin the context of the nature of storytelling, its relationship to other classic works of literature, and the culture of trecento Italy. Stories and storytelling are to be interpreted in terms of a wider cultural context that includes masks, metamorphosis, mythic themes, and character analysis, all of which Boccaccio explores with wit and subtlety. As a storyteller, Boccaccio represents himself as literary pimp, conceiving the relationship between storyteller and audience in sexual terms within a tradition that goes back as far as Socrates' conversations with the young Athenians. As a whole, Boccaccio's great collection of stories creates a trenchant criticism of the ideas that dominated his social and cultural world. Addressed as it is to women who were denied opportunities for education, the author's stories create a university of wise and culturally observant texts. He teaches that comic, religious, sexual, and artistic themes can be seen to function as metaphors for hidden and often dangerous unorthodox thoughts. Kuhns suggests that Decameronis one of the first self-conscious creations of what we today call "a total work of art." Throughout the stories, Boccaccio creates a detailed picture of the Florentine trecento cultural world. Giotto, Buffalmacco, and other great painters of Boccaccio's time appear in the stories. Their works and the paintings that surround the characters as they prepare to leave the plague-ridden city, with their representations of Dante, Aquinas, and other thinkers, are essential to understanding the ways the stories work with other works of art and illuminate and enlarge interpretations of Boccaccio's book.
Download or read book Decameron and the Philosophy of Storytelling written by Richard Kuhns and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-05-11 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this creative and engaging reading, Richard Kuhns explores the ways in which Decameron'ssexual themes lead into philosophical inquiry, moral argument, and aesthetic and literary criticism. As he reveals the stories' many philosophical insights and literary pleasures, Kuhns also examines Decameronin the context of the nature of storytelling, its relationship to other classic works of literature, and the culture of trecento Italy. Stories and storytelling are to be interpreted in terms of a wider cultural context that includes masks, metamorphosis, mythic themes, and character analysis, all of which Boccaccio explores with wit and subtlety. As a storyteller, Boccaccio represents himself as literary pimp, conceiving the relationship between storyteller and audience in sexual terms within a tradition that goes back as far as Socrates' conversations with the young Athenians. As a whole, Boccaccio's great collection of stories creates a trenchant criticism of the ideas that dominated his social and cultural world. Addressed as it is to women who were denied opportunities for education, the author's stories create a university of wise and culturally observant texts. He teaches that comic, religious, sexual, and artistic themes can be seen to function as metaphors for hidden and often dangerous unorthodox thoughts. Kuhns suggests that Decameronis one of the first self-conscious creations of what we today call "a total work of art." Throughout the stories, Boccaccio creates a detailed picture of the Florentine trecento cultural world. Giotto, Buffalmacco, and other great painters of Boccaccio's time appear in the stories. Their works and the paintings that surround the characters as they prepare to leave the plague-ridden city, with their representations of Dante, Aquinas, and other thinkers, are essential to understanding the ways the stories work with other works of art and illuminate and enlarge interpretations of Boccaccio's book.
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 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 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 The Writer as Liar written by Guido Almansi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-26 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1975, The Writer as Liar examines the literary game of falsehood as it is portrayed in the Decameron. The book examines how Boccaccio’s collection of tales has a ‘frame’ story, its own built-in key to the art of story-telling, its internal logic of truth and falsehood, as well as its moments of self-parody, pure narrative intrigue and sophisticated sexual symbolism. The book formulates the argument that Boccaccio’s story telling is seen as an artfully malicious operation, depending for its success not on some abstract concept of narrative originality or the accurate depiction of human psychology, but on the combinative assemblage of narrative blocks, which are manipulated by a craftsman who must lie and cheat with raw material in order to produce a living work – therefore depicting the artist as a liar.
Download or read book The Decameron written by Giovanni Boccaccio and published by Standard Ebooks. This book was released on 2020-10-21T02:07:20Z with total page 989 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. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
Download or read book Decameron Sixth Day in Perspective written by David Lummus and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The expert readings in this collection explore the ten stories of Day Six of Boccaccio's Decameron - a day that involves meditations on language, narration, and meaning
Download or read book Adventures in Speech written by Pier Massimo Forni and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1996 The Decameron is a narrative account of a situation in which narration takes place-a collection of one hundred stories set within a larger story. As a group of young men and women fleeing the plague trade stories to pass the time of crisis, storytelling occurs in a social context that allows for comment upon the tales by the tellers themselves, in a setting that elicits one story in return for another. In his close and original analysis, Pier Massimo Forni uses the notion of rhetoric as a guiding principle for a critical assessment of the Decameron. He explores the discursive tools with which the narrators connect the contents of their stories to their audience's environment, and goes on to argue that the book is significantly marked by Boccaccio's habit of exploring the narrative potential of rhetorical forms. By showing how the Decameron marks a new stage in the development of vernacular realism, Forni also charts a new course in Boccaccio criticism. Viewing the cultural and rhetorical context of the medieval masterpiece from a fresh perspective, he offers intriguing insights into the functioning of Boccaccio's narrative. Adventures in Speech maps the cognitive poetic processes that rule the complex authorial network of relationships involving speech, event, received culture, and narrative objects.
Download or read book The Decameron Day 1 to Day 5 written by Giovanni Boccaccio and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-09-15 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The Decameron' is a collection of short stories by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio. The book is structured as a frame story containing 100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men; they shelter in a secluded villa just outside Florence in order to escape the Black Death, which was afflicting the city. The various tales of love in The Decameron range from the erotic to the tragic. Tales of wit, practical jokes, and life lessons contribute to the mosaic. In addition to its literary value and widespread influence (for example on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), it provides a document of life at the time. Written in the vernacular of the Florentine language, it is considered a masterpiece of classical early Italian prose.
Download or read book Equipment for Living written by Kenneth Burke and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Equipment for Living: The Literary Reviews of Kenneth Burke is the largest collection of Burke's book reviews, most of them reprinted here for the first time. In these reviews, as he engages famous works of poetry, fiction, criticism, and social science from the early 20th century, Burke demonstrates the prominent methods and interests of his influential career.
Download or read book The Decameron Fourth Day in Perspective written by Michael Sherberg and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, part of the Lectura Boccaccii series organized by the American Boccaccio Association, offers close readings by top scholars of Day Four of the Decameron. As fans of the Decameron know, the Fourth Day opens with an important intervention in which the author defends his project against his critics, which coincides with a significant change in tone as the subject matter turns to stories with unhappy endings. The contributors approach the stories from a variety of perspectives, including the linguistic, philosophical, anthropological, and literary historical. These fresh readings of stories that are nearly seven hundred years old testify to the enduring power of Boccaccio’s masterpiece to speak to new audiences and to find compelling relevance even at a great distance from its immediate medieval context.
Download or read book The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio written by Giovanni Boccaccio and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-28 with total page 979 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprised of 100 novellas told by ten men and women over a ten-day journey fleeing plague-infested Florence, the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio is an allegorical work famous for its bawdy portrayals of everyday life, its searing wit and mockery, and its careful adherence to a framed structure. The word "decameron" is derived from the Greek and means "ten days".
Download or read book The Stranger as Friend written by Franco Masciandaro and published by Firenze University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The World at Play in Boccaccio s Decameron written by Giuseppe Mazzotta and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giuseppe Mazzotta provides both a powerful framework for reading the Decameron and an important contribution to medieval and contemporary debates in esthetics. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Gardens written by Robert Pogue Harrison and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-10 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans have long turned to gardens - both real and imaginary - for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh's garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens. With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur'an; Plato's Academy and Epicurus's Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt - all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power. Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, Gardens is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison's earlier classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility - and its enduring importance to humanity.
Download or read book Term Paper Resource Guide to Medieval History written by Jean Shepherd Hamm and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-11-25 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Help students get the most out of studying medieval history with this comprehensive and practical research guide to topics and resources. Term Paper Resource Guide to Medieval History brings key historic events and individuals alive to enrich and stimulate students in challenging and enjoyable ways. Students from high school to college will be able to get a jump start on assignments with the hundreds of term paper projects and research information offered here. The book transforms and elevates the research experience and will prove an invaluable resource for motivating and educating students. Each event entry begins with a brief summary to pique interest and then offers original and thought-provoking term paper ideas in both standard and alternative formats that often incorporate the latest in electronic media, such as the iPod and iMovie. The best primary and secondary sources for further research are annotated, followed by vetted, stable website suggestions and multimedia resources, usually films, for further viewing and listening.
