Dante's Rime


Book Description

Spanning the years from the early 1280s until about 1308, this collection of poems contains Dante's juvenilia as well as his more mature work prior to the Divine Comedy. Patrick Diehl's translation offers in a single volume the bulk of Dante's shorter poetry. The collection, omitting only those poems Dante incorporated into the Vila nuova, contains several masterpieces of medieval poetry and gives us a fascinating look at the poet's development. Originally published in 1979. 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.




Time and the Crystal


Book Description

"A brilliant achievement. The range of learning is enormous, both in medieval scientific, philosophical lore and poetry and in the vast secondary literature on Dante. The authors bring the best traditions of Anglo-American formal analysis to bear upon the petrose, and produce powerful and original interpretations. . . . This will be a book that all serious readers of Dante's poetry--both of the petrose and the Comedy--will want to read."--David Quint, author of Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature




Dante's Multitudes


Book Description

A critical addition to Dante studies that illuminates the poet’s disruptive impact within Italian culture and foregrounds Barolini’s marked contribution to the field. In Dante’s Multitudes, the newest addition to the renowned William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature, Teodolinda Barolini gathers sixteen of her essays exploring the revolutionary character of Dante’s work. Embracing the Vita Nuova, De vulgari eloquentia, Convivio, Epistles, Monarchia, and Rime, and of course the Divine Comedy, these essays together feature the many facets of the poet’s enduring legacy. Dante’s Multitudes showcases the poet’s embrace of multiplicity, difference, and disruption in five parts, each with its own general focus. It begins with an introductory essay on method and the use of history in order to set the stage for the expert analyses that follow. Barolini treats various topics in Dante studies, including sexualized and racialized others in the Comedy, Dante’s unorthodox conception of limbo, his celebration of metaphysical difference within the paradoxical unity of the Paradiso, and his use of Aristotle to think disruptively about wealth and society, on the one hand, and about love and compulsion, on the other. The volume closes with a final meditation on method and “critical philology,” highlighting the ways in which philology has been used uncritically to bolster fallacious hermeneutical narratives about one of the West’s most celebrated and influential poets. Barolini once again opens avenues for further research in this compelling collection of essays. This volume will be of interest to scholars in Dante studies, Italian studies, and medieval and Renaissance literature more broadly.




Dante in Oxford


Book Description

The Paget Toynbee lectures on Dante have taken place in Oxford since the mid-1990s. Named after the great medieval scholar of the first half of the twentieth century, they have been delivered by the major Dante experts of our time. This volume gathers together twelve of the most significant lectures, given by internationally renowned scholars such as Zygmunt Baranski, John Barnes, Lino Leonardi, Emilio Pasquini, Michelangelo Picone, Jonathan Usher and the late Peter Armour. The topics range from key questions such as Dante, Ovid and the poetry of exile, to ground-breaking work on obscenity in the Divine Comedy .




Dante's Plurilingualism


Book Description

Dante's conception of language is encompassed in all his works and can be understood in terms of a strenuous defence of the volgare in tension with the prestige of Latin. By bringing together different approaches, from literary studies to philosophy and history, from aesthetics to queer studies, from psychoanalysis to linguistics, this volume offers new critical insights on the question of Dantes language, engaging with both the philosophical works characterized by an original project of vulgarization, and the poetic works, which perform a new language in an innovative and self-reflexive way. In particular, Dantes Plurilingualism explores the rich and complex way in which Dantes linguistic theory and praxis both informs and reflects an original configuration of the relationship between authority, knowledge and identity that continues to be fascinated by an ideal of unity but is also imbued with a strong element of subjectivity and opens up towards multiplicity and modernity.







Critical Companion to Dante


Book Description

Dante Alighieri is one of the greatest poets in world history. His brilliant epic, "The Divine Comedy", an imagined journey through Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, continues to captivate readers. This work provides an information on his life and work. It covers Dante's canon, including his love poems in "La Vita Nuova" and his philosophical works.




Dante’s Dream


Book Description

Archetypal images, Carl Jung believed, when elaborated in tales and ceremonies, shape culture’s imagination and behavior. Unfortunately, such cultural images can become stale and lose their power over the mind. But an artist or mystic can refresh and revive a culture’s imagination by exploring his personal dream-images and connecting them to the past. Dante Alighieri presents his Divine Comedy as a dream-vision, carefully establishing the date at which it came to him (Good Friday, 1300), and maintaining the perspective of that time and place, throughout the work, upon unfolding history. Modern readers will therefore welcome a Jungian psychoanalytical approach, which can trace both instinctual and spiritual impulses in the human psyche. Some of Dante’s innovations (admission of virtuous pagans to Limbo) and individualized scenes (meeting personal friends in the afterlife) more likely spring from unconscious inspiration than conscious didactic intent. For modern readers, a focus on Dante’s personal dream-journey may offer the best way into his poem.




Dante's Style in His Lyric Poetry


Book Description

A very close and clear description of Dante's style in those lyric poems, which can be dated with reasonable confidence. Dr Boyde explains the nature and objective of his analyses in the substantial introduction which does not assume any previous knowledge of the poems or of modern stylistic theory. He has three principal aims: first, to relate the style of the poems to medieval rhetorical teaching; secondly, to assess the degree of Dante's stylistic originality by comparison with the style of earlier medieval authors; and thirdly, to provide an accurate detailed description of the many developments in Dante's style over a period of twenty years. Close attention is paid throughout to the frequency and distribution of the features described, and there is abundant quotation of examples. The book will have a considerable theoretical interest to all those concerned with the analysis of the style of literature from the past.




Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature


Book Description

Giovanni Boccaccio played a pivotal role in the extraordinary emergence of the Italian literary tradition in the fourteenth century, not only as author of the Decameron, but also as scribe of Dante, Petrarch and Cavalcanti. Using a single codex written entirely in Boccaccio's hand, Martin Eisner brings together material philology and literary history to reveal the multiple ways Boccaccio authorizes this vernacular literary tradition. Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of Boccaccio as a biographer, storyteller, editor and scribe, who constructs arguments, composes narratives, compiles texts and manipulates material forms to legitimize and advance a vernacular literary canon. Situating these philological activities in the context of Boccaccio's broader reflections on poetry in the Decameron and the Genealogy of the Gentile Gods, the book produces a new portrait of Boccaccio that integrates his vernacular and Latin works, while also providing a new context for understanding his fictions.