Author : Gaetana Marrone
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 2258 pages
File Size : 10,16 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Italian literature
ISBN : 1579583903
Publisher description
Author : Pietro Aretino
Publisher : Editorial Edinumen
Page : 164 pages
File Size : 17,54 MB
Release : 2003
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9781895537703
Author : Gaetana Marrone
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 2256 pages
File Size : 18,28 MB
Release : 2006-12-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1135455309
The Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies is a two-volume reference book containing some 600 entries on all aspects of Italian literary culture. It includes analytical essays on authors and works, from the most important figures of Italian literature to little known authors and works that are influential to the field. The Encyclopedia is distinguished by substantial articles on critics, themes, genres, schools, historical surveys, and other topics related to the overall subject of Italian literary studies. The Encyclopedia also includes writers and subjects of contemporary interest, such as those relating to journalism, film, media, children's literature, food and vernacular literatures. Entries consist of an essay on the topic and a bibliographic portion listing works for further reading, and, in the case of entries on individuals, a brief biographical paragraph and list of works by the person. It will be useful to people without specialized knowledge of Italian literature as well as to scholars.
Author : Paola Ugolini
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 20,10 MB
Release : 2020-02-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1487532121
Anti-courtly discourse furnished a platform for discussing some of the most pressing questions of early modern Italian society. The court was the space that witnessed a new form of negotiation of identity and prestige, the definition of masculinity and of gender-specific roles, the birth of modern politics and of an ethics based on merit and on individual self-interest. The Court and Its Critics analyses anti-courtly critiques using a wide variety of sources including manuals of courtliness, dialogues, satires, and plays, from the mid-fifteenth to the early seventeenth century. The book is structured around four key figures that embody different features of anti-courtly sentiments. The figure of the courtier shows that sentiments against the court were present even among those who apparently benefitted from such a system of power. The court lady allows an investigation of the intertwining of anti-courtliness and anti-feminism. The satirist and the shepherd of pastoral dramas are investigated as attempts to fashion two different forms of a new self for the court intellectual.
Author : Veronica Franco
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 327 pages
File Size : 16,63 MB
Release : 2007-11-01
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 0226259854
Veronica Franco (whose life is featured in the motion picture Dangerous Beauty) was a sixteenth-century Venetian beauty, poet, and protofeminist. This collection captures the frank eroticism and impressive eloquence that set her apart from the chaste, silent woman prescribed by Renaissance gender ideology. As an "honored courtesan", Franco made her living by arranging to have sexual relations, for a high fee, with the elite of Venice and the many travelers—merchants, ambassadors, even kings—who passed through the city. Courtesans needed to be beautiful, sophisticated in their dress and manners, and elegant, cultivated conversationalists. Exempt from many of the social and educational restrictions placed on women of the Venetian patrician class, Franco used her position to recast "virtue" as "intellectual integrity," offering wit and refinement in return for patronage and a place in public life. Franco became a writer by allying herself with distinguished men at the center of her city's culture, particularly in the informal meetings of a literary salon at the home of Domenico Venier, the oldest member of a noble family and a former Venetian senator. Through Venier's protection and her own determination, Franco published work in which she defended her fellow courtesans, speaking out against their mistreatment by men and criticizing the subordination of women in general. Venier also provided literary counsel when she responded to insulting attacks written by the male Venetian poet Maffio Venier. Franco's insight into the power conflicts between men and women and her awareness of the threat she posed to her male contemporaries make her life and work pertinent today.
Author : Stephanie Lynn Budin
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 21,1 MB
Release : 2021-05-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0429516673
Examining freewomen in Mesopotamian society, ancient Greek hetaira, Renaissance Italy courtesans, historical and modern Japanese geisha, and the Hindu devadāsī of India, Stephanie Lynn Budin makes a wide-ranging study of independent women who have historically been dismissed as prostitutes. The purpose of this book is to rectify a well-entrenched misunderstanding about a category of women existing throughout world history—women who were not (and are not) under patriarchal authority, here called "Freewomen." Having neither father nor husband, and not being bound to any religious authority monitoring their sexuality, these women are understood to be prostitutes, and the terminology designating them appears as such in dictionaries and common parlance. This book examines five case studies of such women: the Mesopotamian ḫarīmtu, the Greek hetaira, the Italian cortigiana "onesta", the Japanese geisha, and the Indian devadāsī. Thus the book goes from the dawn of written history to the present day, from ancient Europe and the Near East through modern Asia, comparatively examining how each of these cultures had its own version of the Freewoman and what this meant in terms of sexuality, gender, and culture. This work also considers the historiographic infelicities that gave rise and continuance to this misreading of the historic and ethnographic record. This engaging and provocative study will be of great interest to students and scholars working in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Women’s History, Classical Studies, Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical Studies, Asian Studies, World Cultures, and Historiography.
Author : Donald Beecher
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 473 pages
File Size : 48,3 MB
Release : 2008-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0802092926
A rich and multi-faceted aspect of the Italian Renaissance, the comedy has been largely overlooked as a cultural force during the period. In Renaissance Comedy, editor Donald Beecher corrects this oversight with a collection of eleven comedies representative of the principal styles of writing that define the genre. Proceeding from early, ?erudite? imitations of Plautus and Terence to satires, sentimental plays of the middle years, and later, more experimental works, the development of Italian Renaissance comedy is here dissected in a fascinating and vivid light. This first of two volumes boasts five of the best-known plays of the period, each with its own historical and critical introduction. Also included is a general introduction by the editor, which discusses the features of Italian Renaissance comedy, as well as examines the stage histories of the plays and what little is known, in many cases, of the circumstances surrounding their original performances. The introduction raises questions concerning the nature of audiences, the festival occasions during which the plays were performed, and the academies which sponsored many of their creations. As a much-needed reappraisal of these comedic plays, Renaissance Comedy is an invaluable look at the performance history of the Renaissance and Italian culture in general.
Author : Alison Bing
Publisher : EDT srl
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 20,62 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Travel
ISBN : 8866390208
Author : Eugenio Giusti
Publisher : LED Edizioni Universitarie
Page : 98 pages
File Size : 32,21 MB
Release : 2014-11-12T16:00:00+01:00
Category : History
ISBN : 8879167049
Although throughout history women had been confined to enclosed spaces, the advent of courtly life and culture required that men and women would share and interact in public arenas like the princely courts, intellectual salons, or gambling houses. But also in all of these public spaces behavioral rules and regulations aimed to control women’s body by equating honesty with chastity. In this monograph I analyze how in the XVI, XVII, and XVIII centuries women in general, and in particular prostitutes and courtesans, repeatedly challenged those rules in the attempt to affirm their individual freedom. I call this behavior «social amphibology », as just like amphibians these women were able to cross class boundaries and thrive in different social environments. My analysis has three complementary approaches. First, an historical approach where census documents and sumptuary laws are investigated in order to describe the ways in which the political establishment unsuccessfully attempts to enforce its rules over women’s behavior. Second, a literary approach where works by Castigione, Aretino, Bandello, and Veronica Franco are analyzed in order to emphasize the terminological proximity between the legal and the literary languages, and the evolution of the term «courtesan» with its attribute «honest». A third – visual – approach looks at prints of women’s clothing, made by XVI and XVII century artists.The iconographic similarity of all of the images requires a set of rubrics or labels, as a way to control such visual amphibology. In the last segment of this monograph I apply a diachronic perspective to these visual representations as I show how contemporary art historians use the same means of categorization, used in previous centuries, to identify – without any definite proof – paintings and prints included in two recent art exhibitions.
Author : Margaret F. Rosenthal
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 433 pages
File Size : 20,80 MB
Release : 2012-07-13
Category : History
ISBN : 022602749X
The Venetian courtesan has long captured the imagination as a female symbol of sexual license, elegance, beauty, and unruliness. What then to make of the cortigiana onesta—the honest courtesan who recast virtue as intellectual integrity and offered wit and refinement in return for patronage and a place in public life? Veronica Franco (1546-1591) was such a woman, a writer and citizen of Venice, whose published poems and familiar letters offer rich testimony to the complexity of the honest courtesan's position. Margaret F. Rosenthal draws a compelling portrait of Veronica Franco in her cultural social, and economic world. Rosenthal reveals in Franco's writing a passionate support of defenseless women, strong convictions about inequality, and, in the eroticized language of her epistolary verses, the seductive political nature of all poetic contests. It is Veronica Franco's insight into the power conflicts between men and women—and her awareness of the threat she posed to her male contemporaries—that makes her literary works and her dealings with Venetian intellectuals so pertinent today. Combining the resources of biography, history, literary theory, and cultural criticism, this sophisticated interdisciplinary work presents an eloquent and often moving account of one woman's life as an act of self-creation and as a complex response to social forces and cultural conditions. "A book . . . pleasurably redolent of Venice in the 16th-century. Rosenthal gives a vivid sense of a world of salons and coteries, of intricate networks of family and patronage, and of literary exchanges both intellectual and erotic."—Helen Hackett, Times Higher Education Supplement The Honest Courtesan is the basis for the film Dangerous Beauty (1998) directed by Marshall Herskovitz. (The film was re-titled The Honest Courtesan for release in the UK and Europe in 1999.)
