Author: William J. Kennedy
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501703803
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
The Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) is best remembered today for vibrant and impassioned love poetry that helped to establish Italian as a literary language. Petrarch inspired later Renaissance writers, who produced an extraordinary body of work regarded today as perhaps the high-water mark of poetic productivity in the European West. These "Petrarchan" poets were self-consciously aware of themselves as poets—as craftsmen, revisers, and professionals. As William J. Kennedy shows in Petrarchism at Work, this commitment to professionalism and the mastery of poetic craft is essential to understanding Petrarch’s legacy. Petrarchism at Work contributes to recent scholarship that explores relationships between poetics and economic history in early-modern European literature. Kennedy traces the development of a Renaissance aesthetics from one based upon Platonic intuition and visionary furor to one grounded in Aristotelian craftsmanship and technique. Their polarities harbor economic consequences, the first privileging the poet’s divinely endowed talent, rewarded by the autocratic largess of patrons, the other emphasizing the poet’s acquired skill and hard work. Petrarch was the first to exploit the tensions between these polarities, followed by his poetic successors. These include Gaspara Stampa in the emergent salon society of Venice, Michelangelo Buonarroti in the "gift" economy of Medici Florence and papal Rome, Pierre de Ronsard and the poets of his Pléiade brigade in the fluctuant Valois court, and William Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the commercial world of Elizabethan and early Stuart London. As Kennedy shows, the poetic practices of revision and redaction by Petrarch and his successors exemplify the transition from a premodern economy of patronage to an early modern economy dominated by unstable market forces.
Author: Christopher S. Celenza
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780238770
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
An enlightening study of the contradictory character of this canonical fourteenth-century Italian poet. Born in Tuscany in 1304, Italian poet Francesco Petrarca is widely considered one of the fathers of the modern Italian language. Though his writings inspired the humanist movement and subsequently the Renaissance, Petrarch remains misunderstood. He was a man of contradictions—a Roman pagan devotee and a devout Christian, a lover of friendship and sociability, yet intensely private. In this biography, Christopher S. Celenza revisits Petrarch’s life and work for the first time in decades, considering how the scholar’s reputation and identity have changed since his death in 1374. He brings to light Petrarch’s unrequited love for his poetic muse, the anti-institutional attitude he developed as he sought a path to modernity by looking backward to antiquity, and his endless focus on himself. Drawing on both Petrarch’s Italian and Latin writings, this is a revealing portrait of a figure of paradoxes: a man of mystique, historical importance, and endless fascination. It is the only book on Petrarch suitable for students, general readers, and scholars alike.
Author: Victoria Kirkham
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226437434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 568
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Book Description
Although Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) is best known today for cementing the sonnet’s place in literary history, he was also a philosopher, historian, orator, and one of the foremost classical scholars of his age. Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works is the only comprehensive, single-volume source to which anyone—scholar, student, or general reader—can turn for information on each of Petrarch’s works, its place in the poet’s oeuvre, and a critical exposition of its defining features. A sophisticated but accessible handbook that illuminates Petrarch’s love of classical culture, his devout Christianity, his public celebrity, and his struggle for inner peace, this encyclopedic volume covers both Petrarch’s Italian and Latin writings and the various genres in which he excelled: poem, tract, dialogue, oration, and letter. A biographical introduction and chronology anchor the book, making Petrarch an invaluable resource for specialists in Italian, comparative literature, history, classics, religious studies, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.
Author: Mary B. Moore
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809323074
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Moore (English, Marshall U.) analyzes and contextualizes the Petrarchan love sonnet sequences of Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labe, Lady Mary Wroth, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Close readings of the poems are accompanied by theory and criticism regarding constructs of women, historical events, and biographical material, illuminating the poets, Petrarchism as a convention, ideas about women, and the range and limitations of female roles as erotic subjects and objects. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Thomas Roche
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014193672X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
Franceso Petrarch (1304-1374), creator of the sonnet form, remained for more than three hundred years the most influential poet in Europe, his works more widely read than even those of Dante. This collection contains English language versions of his poems from across six centuries, in a wide variety of translations and reinterpretations. Spanning the Trionfi series and the Canzoniere - Petrarch's empassioned sonnet-sequence concerning his beloved Laura - it also includes great English poems influenced by Petrarch. From Chaucer's early adaptation of a Petrarchan sonnet in Troilus and Criseyde to the sixteenth century translations by the Earl of Surrey, Byron's mocking consideration of the Canzoniere in Don Juan and Ezra Pound's parody Silet, all provide a unique insight into the significance of the founder of the European lyric tradition.
Author: Petrarch
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 1624661998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Petrarch fashioned so many different versions of himself for posterity that it is an exacting task to establish where one might start to explore. . . . Hainsworth's study meets this problem through examples of what Petrarch wrote, and does so decisively and succinctly. . . . [A] careful and unpretentious book, penetrating in its organization and treatment of its subject, gentle in its guidance of the reader, nimble and dexterous in its scholarly infrastructure—and no less profound for those qualities of lightness. The translations themselves are a delight, and are clearly the result of profound meditation and extensive experiment. . . . The Introduction and the notes to each work form a clear plexus of support for the reader, with a host of deft cross-references. --Richard Mackenny, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Author: Gur Zak
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521114675
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191
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Book Description
In this book, Gur Zak examines two central issues in Petrarch's works - his humanist philosophy and his concept of the self.
Author: Giuseppe Mazzotta
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082238261X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
At the center of Petrarch's vision, announcing a new way of seeing the world, was the individual, a sense of the self that would one day become the center of modernity as well. This self, however, seemed to be fragmented in Petrarch's work, divided among the worlds of philosophy, faith, and love of the classics, politics, art, and religion, of Italy, France, Greece, and Rome. In recent decades scholars have explored each of these worlds in depth. In this work, Giuseppe Mazzotta shows for the first time how all these fragmentary explorations relate to each other, how these separate worlds are part of a common vision. Written in a clear and passionate style, The Worlds of Petrarch takes us into the politics of culture, the poetic imagination, into history and ethics, art and music, rhetoric and theology. With this encyclopedic strategy, Mazzotta is able to demonstrate that the self for Petrarch is not a unified whole but a unity of parts, and, at the same time, that culture emerges not from a consensus but from a conflict of ideas produced by opposition and dark passion. These conflicts, intrinsic to Petrarch's style of thought, lead Mazzotta to a powerful rethinking of the concepts of "fragments" and "unity" and, finally, to a new understanding of the relationship between them.
Author: Francesco Petrarca
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674003462
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Petrarch was the leading spirit in the Renaissance movement to revive literary Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, and Greco-Roman culture in general. My Secret Book reveals a remarkable self-awareness as he probes and evaluates the springs of his own morally dubious addictions to fame and love.
Author: William J. Kennedy
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801881269
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 398
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Book Description
Drawing upon poststructuralist theories of nationalism and national identity developed by such writers as Etienne Balibar, Emmanuel Levinas, Julia Kristeva, Antonio Negri, and Slavoj Zizek, noted Renaissance scholar William J. Kennedy argues that the Petrarchan sonnet serves as a site for early modern expressions of national sentiment in Italy, France, England, Spain, and Germany. Kennedy pursues this argument through historical research into Renaissance commentaries on Petrarch's poetry and critical studies of such poets as Lorenzo de' Medici, Joachim du Bellay and the Pléiade brigade, Philip and Mary Sidney, and Mary Wroth. Kennedy begins with a survey of Petrarch's poetry and its citation in Italy, explaining how major commentators tried to present Petrarch as a spokesperson for competing versions of national identity. He then shows how Petrarch's model helped define social class, political power, and national identity in mid-sixteenth-century France, particularly in the nationalistic sonnet cycles of Joachim Du Bellay. Finally, Kennedy discusses how Philip Sidney and his sister Mary and niece Mary Wroth reworked Petrarch's model to secure their family's involvement in forging a national policy under Elizabeth I and James I . Treating the subject of early modern national expression from a broad comparative perspective, The Site of Petrarchism will be of interest to scholars of late medieval and early modern literature in Europe, historians of culture, and critical theorists.
