Decameron Eighth Day in Perspective

Decameron Eighth Day in Perspective PDF Author: William Robins
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487506902
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
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.

Decameron Eighth Day in Perspective

Decameron Eighth Day in Perspective PDF Author: William Robins
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487506902
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
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.

The Decameron Ninth Day in Perspective

The Decameron Ninth Day in Perspective PDF Author: Simone Marchesi
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487540515
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
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.

The Decameron First Day in Perspective

The Decameron First Day in Perspective PDF Author: Elissa B. Weaver
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487586744
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
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.

Law and Mimesis in Boccaccio's Decameron

Law and Mimesis in Boccaccio's Decameron PDF Author: Justin Steinberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009080687
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
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.

Boccaccio and Exemplary Literature

Boccaccio and Exemplary Literature PDF Author: Olivia Holmes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009224387
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
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.

Reconsidering Boccaccio

Reconsidering Boccaccio PDF Author: Olivia Holmes
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487501781
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
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.

Blurred Boundaries and Deceptive Dichotomies in Pre-Modern Texts and Images

Blurred Boundaries and Deceptive Dichotomies in Pre-Modern Texts and Images PDF Author: Dafna Nissim
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111243893
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
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.

Boccaccio’s Florence

Boccaccio’s Florence PDF Author: Elsa Filosa
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487532733
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
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.

Gendering the Renaissance

Gendering the Renaissance PDF Author: Meredith K. Ray
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1644533065
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
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.

The Decameron

The Decameron PDF Author: Giovanni Boccaccio
Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1040

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Book Description
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.