Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante

Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante PDF Author: Elena Lombardi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192550942
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
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.

Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante

Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante PDF Author: Elena Lombardi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192550942
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante

Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante PDF Author: Elena Lombardi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198818963
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
A study of the figure of the woman reader in medieval Italian literature that places 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.

In the Footsteps of Dante

In the Footsteps of Dante PDF Author: Teresa Bartolomei
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110796090
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Dante, the pilgrim, is the image of an author who stubbornly looks ahead, seeking and building the "Great Beyond" (Manguel). Following in his footsteps is therefore not a return to the past, going à rebours, but a commitment to the future, to exploring the potential of humanity to "transhumanise". This dynamic of self-transcendence in Dante’s humanism (Ossola), which claims for European civilisation a vocation for universalism (Ferroni), is analysed in the volume at three crucial moments: Firstly, the establishment of an emancipatory relationship between author and reader (Ascoli), in which authorship is authority and not power; secondly, the conception of vision as a learning process and horizon of eschatological overcoming (Mendonça); finally, the relationship with the past, which is never purely monumental, but ethically and intertextually dynamic, in an original rewriting of the original scriptural, medieval, and classical culture (Nasti, Bolzoni, Bartolomei). A second group of contributions is dedicated to the reconstruction of Dante’s presence in Portuguese literature (Almeida, Espírito Santo, Figueiredo, Marnoto, Vaz de Carvalho): they attest to the innovative impact of Dante’s work even in literary traditions more distant from it.

Reading Chaucer in Time

Reading Chaucer in Time PDF Author: Kara Gaston
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019885286X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue -- in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science -- but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. Reading for form can mean reading for formation. Understanding processes through which a text was created can help us in characterizing its form. But what is involved in bringing a diachronic process to bear upon a synchronic work? When does literary formation begin and end? When does form happen? These questions emerge with urgency in the interactions between English poet Geoffrey Chaucer and Italian trecento authors Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Francis Petrarch. In fourteenth-century Italy, new ways were emerging of configuring the relation between author and reader. Previously, medieval reading was often oriented around the significance of the text to the individual reader. In Italy, however, reading was beginning to be understood as a way of getting back to a work's initial formation. This book tracks how concepts of reading developed within Italian texts, including Dante's Vita nova, Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida, and Petrarch's Seniles, impress themselves upon Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales. It argues that Chaucer's poetry reveals the implications of reading for formation: above all, that it both depends upon and effaces the historical perspective and temporal experience of the individual reader. Problems raised within Chaucer's poetry thus inform this book's broader methodological argument: that there is no one moment at which the formation of Chaucer's poetry ends; rather its form emerges in and through process of reading within time.

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.

Vertical Readings in Dante's Comedy

Vertical Readings in Dante's Comedy PDF Author: George Corbett
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1783743611
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy is a reappraisal of the poem by an international team of thirty-four scholars. Each vertical reading analyses three same-numbered cantos from the three canticles: Inferno i, Purgatorio i and Paradiso i; Inferno ii, Purgatorio ii and Paradiso ii; etc. Although scholars have suggested before that there are correspondences between same-numbered cantos that beg to be explored, this is the first time that the approach has been pursued in a systematic fashion across the poem. This collection in three volumes offers an unprecedented repertoire of vertical readings for the whole poem. As the first volume exemplifies, vertical reading not only articulates unexamined connections between the three canticles but also unlocks engaging new ways to enter into core concerns of the poem. The three volumes thereby provide an indispensable resource for scholars, students and enthusiasts of Dante. The volume has its origin in a series of thirty-three public lectures held in Trinity College, the University of Cambridge (2012-2016) which can be accessed at the Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy website.

Manuscript Poetics

Manuscript Poetics PDF Author: Francesco Marco Aresu
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268206473
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Manuscript Poetics explores the interrelationship between the material features of textual artifacts and the literary aspects of the medieval Italian texts they preserve. This original study is both an investigation into the material foundations of literature and a reflection on notions of textuality, writing, and media in late medieval and early modern Italy. Francesco Marco Aresu examines the book-objects of manuscripts and early printed editions, asking questions about the material conditions of production, circulation, and reception of literary works. He invites scholars to reconcile reading with seeing (and with touching) and to challenge contemporary presumptions about technological neutrality and the modes of interfacing and reading. Manuscript Poetics investigates the correspondences between textuality and materiality, content and medium, and visual-verbal messages and their physical support through readings of Dante Alighieri’s Vita nova, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Teseida, and Francesco Petrarca’s canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta). Aresu shows that Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarca evaluated and deployed the tools of scribal culture to shape, signal, or layer meanings beyond those they conveyed in their written texts. Medieval texts, Aresu argues, are uniquely positioned to provide this perspective, and they are foundational to the theoretical understanding of new forms and materials in our media-saturated contemporary world.

Dante and the Practice of Humility

Dante and the Practice of Humility PDF Author: Rachel K. Teubner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009315366
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
In this book, Rachel Teubner offers an exploration of humility in Dante's Divine Comedy, arguing that the poem is an ascetical exercise concerned with training its author gradually in the practice of humility, rather than being a reflection of authorial hubris. A contribution to recent scholarship that considers the poem to be a work of self-examination, her volume investigates its scriptural, literary, and liturgical sources, also offering fresh feminist perspectives on its theological challenges. Teubner demonstrates how the poetry of the Comedy is theologically significant, focusing especially on the poem's definition of humility as ethically and artistically meaningful. Interrogating the text canto by canto, she also reveals how contemporary tools of literary analysis can offer new insights into its meaning. Undergraduate and novice readers will benefit from this companion, just as theologians and scholars of medieval religion will be introduced to a growing body of scholarship exploring Dante's religious thought.

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.

Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories

Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories PDF Author: Elena Lombardi
Publisher: ICI Berlin Press
ISBN: 3965580566
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories presents a unique form of creative scholarship. It employs Dante’s late medieval take on Ulysses and his tragic pursuit of ‘virtue and knowledge’ as a prism that refracts an ancient myth of journey and return into a modern story of discovery and nostalgia. Working notes, fragments from Ulysses’ many stories, personal memories, illuminations, and rewritings combine to form a new chain of narratives about the desire to create, the art of travelling, and the will of self-reinvention.