Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the Commedia

Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the Commedia PDF Author: Nicolò Crisafi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192672150
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the 'Commedia' questions the familiar narrative arc at play in the writings of Dante Alighieri and opens his masterpiece to three alternative models that resist it. Dante's masterplot is the teleological trajectory by which the poet subordinates the past to the authority of a new experience. The book analyses the masterplot's workings in Dante's text and its role in the interpretation of the poem, and it documents its overwhelming success in influencing readings of the Commedia over the centuries. The volume then explores three competing narrative models that resist and counter its monopoly which are enacted by paradoxes, alternative endings and parallel lives, and the future. By focusing on these non-linear modes of storytelling and testing the limits of linear narration, the book questions critical paradigms in the scholarship of the Commedia that favour a single normative master truth, exposes their problematic authoritarian implications, and highlights the manifold poetic, theological, and ethical tensions that are often neglected due to the masterplot's influence. The new picture of a vulnerable author and open-ended text that emerges from this study thus doubles as a metacritical reflection on the state of the field. The book's impassioned argument is that, alongside established notions of his trademark plurality of linguistic registers and styles, Dante's narrative pluralism can, and should, come to play a key role in contemporary and future readings of the Commedia.

Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the Commedia

Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the Commedia PDF Author: Nicolò Crisafi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192672150
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the 'Commedia' questions the familiar narrative arc at play in the writings of Dante Alighieri and opens his masterpiece to three alternative models that resist it. Dante's masterplot is the teleological trajectory by which the poet subordinates the past to the authority of a new experience. The book analyses the masterplot's workings in Dante's text and its role in the interpretation of the poem, and it documents its overwhelming success in influencing readings of the Commedia over the centuries. The volume then explores three competing narrative models that resist and counter its monopoly which are enacted by paradoxes, alternative endings and parallel lives, and the future. By focusing on these non-linear modes of storytelling and testing the limits of linear narration, the book questions critical paradigms in the scholarship of the Commedia that favour a single normative master truth, exposes their problematic authoritarian implications, and highlights the manifold poetic, theological, and ethical tensions that are often neglected due to the masterplot's influence. The new picture of a vulnerable author and open-ended text that emerges from this study thus doubles as a metacritical reflection on the state of the field. The book's impassioned argument is that, alongside established notions of his trademark plurality of linguistic registers and styles, Dante's narrative pluralism can, and should, come to play a key role in contemporary and future readings of the Commedia.

Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the Commedia

Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the Commedia PDF Author: Nicolò Crisafi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192857673
Category : Narration (Rhetoric)
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the 'Commedia' questions the familiar narrative arc at play in the writings of Dante Alighieri and opens his masterpiece to three alternative models that resist it. Dante's masterplot is the teleological trajectory by which the poet subordinates the past to the authority of a new experience. The book analyses the masterplot's workings in Dante's text and its role in the interpretation of the poem, and it documents its overwhelming success in influencing readings of the Commedia over the centuries. The volume then explores three competing narrative models that resist and counter its monopoly which are enacted by paradoxes, alternative endings and parallel lives, and the future. By focusing on these non-linear modes of storytelling and testing the limits of linear narration, the book questions critical paradigms in the scholarship of the Commedia that favour a single normative master truth, exposes their problematic authoritarian implications, and highlights the manifold poetic, theological, and ethical tensions that are often neglected due to the masterplot's influence. The new picture of a vulnerable author and open-ended text that emerges from this study thus doubles as a metacritical reflection on the state of the field. The book's impassioned argument is that, alongside established notions of his trademark plurality of linguistic registers and styles, Dante's narrative pluralism can, and should, come to play a key role in contemporary and future readings of the Commedia.

Iacopone da Todi

Iacopone da Todi PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004682988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
The first ever collection of essays in English on Iacopone da Todi by a diverse group of international scholars, this book offers a contemporary critical assessment on this medieval Franciscan poet of the thirteenth century. Combining philological analyses with thematic studies and philosophical and theological interpretations of the original contents and style of Iacopone’s poetry, the collection considers a wide range of topics, from music to prayer and performance, mysticism, asceticism, ineffability, Mariology, art, poverty, and the challenges of translation. It is a major contribution to the understanding of Iacopone’s laude in the 21st century. Contributors are Erminia Ardissino, Alvaro Cacciotti, Nicolò Crisafi, Anne-Gaëlle Cuif, Federica Franzè, Alexander J.B. Hampton, Magdalena Maria Kubas, Matteo Leonardi, Brian K. Reynolds, Oana Sălișteanu, Samia Tawwab, Alessandro Vettori, Carlo Zacchetti, and Estelle Zunino.

Dante and His Circle

Dante and His Circle PDF Author: Julia Bolton Holloway
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031440935
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description


Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante

Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante PDF Author: Giulia Gaimari
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787352277
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante presents new research by international scholars on the themes of ethics, politics and justice in the works of Dante Alighieri, including chapters on Dante’s modern ‘afterlife’. Together the chapters explore how Dante’s writings engage with the contemporary culture of medieval Florence and Italy, and how and why his political and moral thought still speaks compellingly to modern readers. The collection’s contributors range across different disciplines and scholarly traditions – history, philology, classical reception, philosophy, theology – to scrutinise Dante’s Divine Comedy and his other works in Italian and Latin, offering a multi-faceted approach to the evolution of Dante’s political, ethical and legal thought throughout his writing career. Certain chapters focus on his early philosophical Convivio and on the accomplished Latin Eclogues of his final years, while others tackle knotty themes relating to judgement, justice, rhetoric and literary ethics in his Divine Comedy, from hell to paradise. The closing chapters discuss different modalities of the public reception and use of Dante’s work in both Italy and Britain, bringing the volume’s emphasis on morality, political philosophy, and social justice into the modern age of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England PDF Author: Jonathan Hughes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350146293
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Dante's Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England compares the intellectual, emotional, and religious world of Dante in 13th-century Florence with that of a group of English intellectuals gathered around Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, uncle of the King, Henry VI. Here, Jonathan Hughes establishes that there was a Renaissance in 15th-century England, encouraged by the discovery and translations of works of Greek philosophers and developments in science and medicine; and that vernacular writers in Gloucester's circle, such as John Lydgate and Robert Hoccleve, were of fundamental importance in exploring the meaning of the self and man's relationship with the natural world and the classical past. However, the appearance in 15th-century England of Dante's 'Commedia', the most popular work of the Middle Ages, served to remind writers and readers of the cost of intellectual enquiry: the loss of faith in a harmonious and beautiful world; the redemptive power of the love of a woman; and the tangible presence of an afterlife. Engagingly written and meticulously researched, this innovative study shines a new perspective on Dante scholarship as well as offering a unique anaylsis of intellectual thought and culture in 15th-century England.

The Oxford Handbook of Dante

The Oxford Handbook of Dante PDF Author: Manuele Gragnolati
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198820747
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 778

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Dante contains forty-four specially written chapters that provide a thorough and creative reading of Dante's oeuvre. It gathers an intergenerational and international team of scholars encompassing diverse approaches from the fields of Anglo-American, Italian, and continental scholarship and spanning several disciplines: philology, material culture, history, religion, art history, visual studies, theory from the classical to the contemporary, queer, post- and de-colonial, and feminist studies. The volume combines a rigorous reassessment of Dante's formation, themes, and sources, with a theoretically up-to-date focus on textuality, thereby offering a new critical Dante. The volume is divided into seven sections: 'Texts and Textuality'; 'Dialogues'; 'Transforming Knowledge'; Space(s) and Places'; 'A Passionate Selfhood'; 'A Non-linear Dante'; and 'Nachleben'. It seeks to challenge the Commedia-centric approach (the conviction that notwithstanding its many contradictions, Dante's works move towards the great reservoir of poetry and ideas that is the Commedia), in order to bring to light a non-teleological way in which these works relate amongst themselves. Plurality and the openness of interpretation appear as Dante's very mark, coexisting with the attempt to create an all-encompassing mastership. The Handbook suggests what is exciting about Dante now and indicate where Dante scholarship is going, or can go, in a global context.

Otherworlds

Otherworlds PDF Author: Aisling Nora Byrne
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198746008
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book offers a new perspective on the "otherworlds" of medieval literature. These fantastical realms are among the most memorable places in medieval writing, by turns beautiful and monstrous, alluring and terrifying. Passing over a river or sea, or entering into a hollow hill, heroes come upon strange and magical realms. These places are often very beautiful, filled with sweet music, and adorned with precious stones and rich materials. There is often no darkness, time may pass at a different pace, and the people who dwell there are usually supernatural. Sometimes such a place is exactly what it appears to be--the land of heart's desire--but, the otherworld can also have a sinister side, trapping humans and keeping them there against their will. Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature takes a fresh look at how medieval writers understood these places and why they found them so compelling. It focuses on texts from England, but places this material in the broader context of literary production in medieval Britain and Ireland. The narratives examined in this book tell a rather surprising story about medieval notions of these fantastical places. Otherworlds are actually a lot less "other" than they might initially seem. Authors often use the idea of the otherworld to comment on very serious topics. It is not unusual for otherworld depictions to address political issues in the historical world. Most intriguing of all are those texts where locations in the real world are re-imagined as otherworlds. The regions on which this book focuses, Britain, Ireland, and the surrounding islands, prove particularly susceptible to this characterization.

Exotic Spaces in German Modernism

Exotic Spaces in German Modernism PDF Author: Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199604126
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei demonstrates that the exotic, as reflected in major works of German literature and in the philosophy and art that inspires it, provokes central questions about the modern self and the spaces it inhabits. Exotic spaces in the writings of such authors as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gottfried Benn, and Bertold Brecht, along with the thought of Nietzsche, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Simmel and the art ofGerman Expressionism, are shown to present alternatives to the landscape and experience of modernity. In an examination of the concept of the exotic and of spatial experience in their cultural, subjective, and philosophical contingencies, Gosetti-Ferencei shows that exotic spaces may contest andreconfigure the relationship between the familiar and the foreign, the self and the other. Exotic spaces may serve not only to affirm the subject in a symbolic conquering of territory, as emphasized in post-colonial interpretations, or project the fantasy of escapism to a lost paradise, as utopian readings suggest, but condition moral, aesthetic, or imaginative transformation. Such transformation, while risking disaster or dissolution of the self as well as endangerment of the other, maypromote new possibilities of perceiving or being, and reconfigure the boundaries of a familiar world. As exotic spaces are conceived as mystical, liberating, erotic, infectious, frightening or mysterious, several possibilities for transformation emerge in their exposure: re-enchantment through epiphany;the collapse of the rational self; liberation of the imagination from the confines of the familiar world; and aesthetic transformation, revealing the paradoxically 'primitive' nature of modern experience. In strikingly original readings of canonical authors and compelling rediscoveries of forgotten ones, this study establishes that exotic experience can evidence the fragility of the European or Germanic self as depicted in modernist literature, revealing the usually unconsidered boundaries ofthe subject's own familiar world.

Travelling in Different Skins

Travelling in Different Skins PDF Author: Dúnlaith Bird
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0199644160
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Dúnlaith Bird argues that vagabondage - a physical and textual elaboration of gender identity in motion - emerges as a totemic concept in European women's travel writing from 1850. For travellers including Olympe Audouard, Isabella Bird, Isabelle Eberhardt, and Freya Stark,vagabondage is a means of pushing out the physical, geographical, and textual parameters by which 'women' are defined. Travelling in Different Skins explores the negotiations of European women travel writers from 1850-1950 within the traditionally male-oriented discourses of colonialism and Orientalism. Moving from historical overview to close textual reading, it traces a complex web of tacit collusion and gleeful defiance. These women improvise access to the highly gendered 'imaginative geography' of the Orient. Tactics including cross-dressing, commerciality, and the effacement of their male companions are used to carve out a space for their unconventional and often sexually-hybrid constructions. Using a composite theoretical basis of the later critical work of Judith Butler and Edward Said, this comparative study of British and French colonial empires and gender norms draws out the nuances in these travellers' constructions of gender identity. Women travel writers are shown to play an important role in the legacy of sexual experimentation and self-creation in the Orient, traditionally associated with male writers including Gide and Pierre Loti, and now ripe for critical re-evaluation. This study demonstrates how these women use lived experiences of restriction and negotiation to elaborate advanced theories of motion and gender construction, presaging the concerns of twenty-first century feminism and post-colonialism.