Download or read book The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta written by Giovanni Boccaccio and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1990-11-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A milestone in feminist literature, this marvelous European romance, narrated by a woman, is considered the first psychological novel in a modern language and a precursor of stream-of-consciousness fiction. Written by Giovanni Boccaccio between 1343 and 1345, The Elegy has never before been available in a complete or accurate English translation. Lady Fiammetta, the first-person narrator and protagonist, recounts how, although a married woman, she falls in love with a handsome young foreigner named Panfilo and, driven by irresistible passion, becomes his lover. Panfilo subsequently abandons Fiammetta and returns to his native land, where his elderly father is said to be dying. When he fails to keep his promise to return, Fiammetta, in what is the heart of the narrative, describes her longings, her anguish, and her despair. A host of contradictory sentiments drive her to desperation and to an unsuccessful suicide attempt. After a time, Fiammetta resumes her futile wait for Panfilo. She finally resolves to seek him out in his native land. Disguising her true intent from her husband, she secures his promise to help her in this undertaking. Addressing an exclusively female audience, Fiammetta warns them about the vicious ways of men. Her whole narrative, in fact, adds up to an indictment of men as both readers and lovers. Eliciting a remarkably wide range of responses from readers and critics, Fiammetta has been variously described as a pathetic victim of male cruelty; an irresponsible fool of a girl; a sophisticated, cunning, and wholly disingenuous female; and, finally, a genuinely modern woman. Whatever judgment we make of her, Fiammetta stands out among medieval women as an ardent and outspoken feminist.

Download or read book Boccaccio written by Victoria Kirkham, and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long celebrated as one of “the Three Crowns” of Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) experimented widely with the forms of literature. His prolific and innovative writings—which range beyond the novella, from lyric to epic, from biography to mythography and geography, from pastoral and romance to invective—became powerful models for authors in Italy and across the Continent. This collection of essays presents Boccaccio’s life and creative output in its encyclopedic diversity. Exploring a variety of genres, Latin as well as Italian, it provides short descriptions of all his works, situates them in his oeuvre, and features critical expositions of their most salient features and innovations. Designed for readers at all levels, it will appeal to scholars of literature, medieval and Renaissance studies, humanism and the classical tradition; as well as European historians, art historians, and students of material culture and the history of the book. Anchored by an introduction and chronology, this volume contains contributions by prominent Boccaccio scholars in the United States, as well as essays by contributors from France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. The year 2013, Boccaccio’s seven-hundredth birthday, will be an important one for the study of his work and will see an increase in academic interest in reassessing his legacy.

Download or read book The Elegy of Madonna Fiammetta Sent by Her to Women in Love written by Giovanni Boccaccio and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1992 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Elegy of Madonna Fiammetta is narrated by a woman who recounts her love affair with a young man she calls Panfilo and his betrayal of her. Medieval works depict courtly love as a disease suffered by upper-class men; the Elegy depicts the process of falling in love from the woman's point of view. It is important both in its own right as a literary work and because of its authorial feminism; Boccaccio makes us appreciate both the folly of the narrator and the treachery of Panfilo and (by extension) of all men. In addition, it is a precursor of the psychological and epistolary novels and is of importance in the history of prose fiction.

Download or read book The Cambridge History of Italian Literature written by Peter Brand and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-08-28 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italy possesses one of the richest and most influential literatures of Europe, stretching back to the thirteenth century. This substantial history of Italian literature provides a comprehensive survey of Italian writing since its earliest origins. Leading scholars describe and assess the work of writers who have contributed to the Italian literary tradition, including Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, the Renaissance humanists, Machiavelli, Ariosto and Tasso, pioneers and practitioners of commedia dell'arte and opera, and the contemporary novelists Calvino and Eco. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature sets out to be accessible to the general reader as well as to students and scholars: translations are provided, along with a map, chronological chart and substantial bibliographies.

Download or read book Stages of Desire written by Michael Kidd and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 1999-07-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the rich tradition of Spanish theater lies an unexplored dimension reflecting themes from classical mythology. Through close readings of selected plays from early modern and twentieth-century Spanish literature with plots or characters derived from the Greco-Roman tradition, Michael Kidd shows that the concept of desire plays a pivotal role in adapting myth to the stage in each of several historical periods. In Stages of Desire, Kidd offers a new way of looking at the theater in Spain. Reviewing the work of playwrights from Juan del Encina to Luis Riaza, he suggests that desire constitutes a central element in a large number of Greco-Roman myths and shows how dramatists have exploited this to resituate ancient narratives within their own artistic and ideological horizons. Among the works he analyzes are Timoneda's Tragicomedia llamada Filomena, Castro's Dido y Eneas, and Unamuno's Fedra. Kidd explores how seventeenth-century playwrights were constrained by the conventions of the newly formed national theater, and how in the twentieth century mythological desire was exploited by playwrights engaged in upsetting the melodramatic conventions of the entrenched bourgeois theater. He also examines the role of desire both in the demythification of prominent classical heroes during the Franco regime and in the cultural critique of institutionalized discrimination in the current democratic period. Stages of Desire is an original and broad-ranging study that highlights both change and continuity in Spanish theater. By elegantly combining theory, literary history, and close textual analysis, Kidd demonstrates both the resilience of Greco-Roman myths and the continuing vitality of the Spanish stage.

Download or read book Book Production and Letters in the Western European Renaissance written by Anna Laura Lepschy and published by MHRA. This book was released on 1986 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Download or read book The European Roman d Analyse written by Adele Kudish and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through close readings of a selection of European novels and novellas written between 1340 and 1827, this study of "analytical fiction" examines how unconsummated love stories probe the frailty of self-knowledge. Tracing elements of what the French call the roman d'analyse in the works of Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre, Cervantes, Marie de Lafayette, Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and Stendhal, Adele Kudish discusses how the metaphor of unconsummated love is deployed to represent a fundamental lack of insight into the self. Rather than depicting the mind as transparent, analytical fiction deals in the opacity of the mind. Narrators and characters are faced with deception, misprision, doubt, and confusion, leading to self-deception, jealousy, and crises of self. The European Roman d'Analyse reads such epistemological failures as symptoms of a more fundamental preoccupation with the human psyche as un-chartable and bizarre. In this way, the authors of romans d'analyse enact a larger philosophical project: an anatomy of the psyche wherein we are unable-or unwilling-to know ourselves.

Download or read book Courtly Literature written by International Courtly Literature Society. Congress and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The International Courtly Literature Society aims to promote the study of courtly literature, primarily, but not exclusively, of medieval Europe. The 45 articles selected here from the papers presented at the 5th Congress center around three themes: rhetoric and courtly literature, the audience of courtly literature, and courtly literature in a comparative perspective. There are contributions by specialists in Old French Literature on such diverse topics as Adenet le Roi, Rene d'Anjou, Le Bel Inconnu, and 15th-century prose chronicles; by Provencalists on the eternal topic of courtly love; by Anglicists on Chaucer, Henryson, Malory, and others; by Germanists on Heinrich von Morungen, der Schwanritter, and Walther von der Vogelweide; by Hispanists on La Celestina and the Historia Troiana; there are also articles on Italian, Dutch, and Scandinavian literature, and two relating to Persian and Arabic courtly texts.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies written by Gaetana Marrone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-12-26 with total page 2256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies is a two-volume reference book containing some 600 entries on all aspects of Italian literary culture. It includes analytical essays on authors and works, from the most important figures of Italian literature to little known authors and works that are influential to the field. The Encyclopedia is distinguished by substantial articles on critics, themes, genres, schools, historical surveys, and other topics related to the overall subject of Italian literary studies. The Encyclopedia also includes writers and subjects of contemporary interest, such as those relating to journalism, film, media, children's literature, food and vernacular literatures. Entries consist of an essay on the topic and a bibliographic portion listing works for further reading, and, in the case of entries on individuals, a brief biographical paragraph and list of works by the person. It will be useful to people without specialized knowledge of Italian literature as well as to scholars.

Download or read book The Gallery of Memory written by Lina Bolzoni and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes as its starting point a striking paradox: that the antique tradition of the art of memory -- created by an oral culture -- reached its moment of greatest diffusion during an age that saw the birth of the printed book.

Download or read book The Poet s Wisdom written by Timothy Kircher and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2006 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores the philosophical thinking of Petrarch and Boccaccio in contrast to the writings of contemporary mendicants. Examining both Latin and vernacular works, it investigates how these humanists poetically express the temporal, subjective, and emotional quality of moral sensibility, in a way that shifts to the reader the weight of discerning the ethical message. The book centers its analysis on a series of paradoxes pondered by these humanists: the self that changes yet persists over time; the awareness of self-deception; the individual's validation of authority; and the ethics of pleasure. This study is valuable to those interested in Renaissance philosophy, literature, religion, and the history of ideas.

Download or read book Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante written by Elena Lombardi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante brings to light a new character in medieval literature: that of the woman reader and interlocutor. It does so by establishing a dialogue between literary studies, gender studies, the history of literacy, and the material culture of the book in medieval times. From Guittone d'Arezzo's piercing critic, the 'villainous woman', to the mysterious Lady who bids Guido Cavalcanti to write his grand philosophical song, to Dante's female co-editors in the Vita Nova and his great characters of female readers, such as Francesca and Beatrice in the Comedy, all the way to Boccaccio's overtly female audience, this particular interlocutor appears to be central to the construct of textuality and the construction of literary authority. This volume explores the figure of the woman reader by contextualizing her within the history of female literacy, the material culture of the book, and the ways in which writers and poets of earlier traditions imagined her. It argues that these figures are not mere veneers between a male author and a 'real' male readership, but that, although fictional, they bring several advantages to their vernacular authors, such as orality, the mother tongue, the recollection of the delights of early education, literality, freedom in interpretation, absence of teleology, the beauties of ornamentation and amplification, a reduced preoccupation with the fixity of the text, the pleasure of making mistakes, dialogue with the other, the extension of desire, original simplicity, and new and more flexible forms of authority.

Download or read book European Literary Careers written by Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature Patrick Cheney and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first book-length study in the fieldof authorial criticism, various specialists from Italian, French, English, and Spanish studies collectively discuss literary careers spanning from classical antiquity through the Renaissance.

Download or read book The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio written by Giovanni Boccaccio and published by . This book was released on 1895 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Fernando de Rojas and the Renaissance Vision written by Ricardo Castells and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Amorous Fiammetta written by Giovanni Boccaccio and published by . This book was released on 1926 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Severed Word written by Marina Scordilis Brownlee and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging study Marina Scordilis Brownlee investigates the importance of the letter--often a complex interplay of objectivity and subjectivity--in the establishment of novelistic discourse. She shows how Ovid's Heroides explore the discourse of epistolarity in a way that exerted a lasting effect on Italian, French, and Spanish works of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, especially on the fifteenth-century Spanish novela sentimental, or "sentimental romance." Presenting this proto-novelistic form as a highly original rewriting of Ovid, Brownlee demonstrates that its language model interrogates rather than affirms the linguistic referentiality implied by romance. Whereas the ambiguity of the sign had been articulated in fourteenth-century Spain (most notably by the Libro de buen amor), it is the fifteenth-century novela sentimental that fully grasps the existentially, novelistically dire consequences of this ambiguity. And in the process of deconstructing the referentiality that underlies romance, the novela sentimental reveals itself to be a discursively essential step in the evolution of the modern novel. Originally published in 1990. 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.