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Adapted brains and imaginary worlds : cognitive science and the literature of the Renaissance
\"The literary discipline is based on principles of structure and language, is concerned with interpreting the emotions in characters comprising humanity in all its variety reacting to the provocations of their imaginary worlds, and encompasses our cognitive and affective reactions to those representations. So much of what we take from reading, though, is not linked to language: linguistic prompts merely set in motion the associations, memories, and images through which we generate meaning and emotionalize experience. Reading, if it is to understand how and why our minds complete fictive worlds, must take an interest in what the emotions are, where they originate, and what they are for. The cognitive sciences offer valuable perspectives on the feeling brain, perspectives which reveal much about the emotions of imaginary persons and the feelings they arouse in readers. This work aims to connect textual interpretation and brain science. In so doing, it furthers the understanding of literary experience and opens up new approaches to literature in general through philosophical insights into the human brain. Each of the book's eleven chapters sets out to bring a relevant cognitive perspective into the spotlight: memory, the emotions, the self, intentionality, laughter, crying, conversion experience, the psychology of suspense, criminal deviancy, binary ethics--the narrative brain in perceptual and imaginative modes--by analyzing these experiences and emotions in relevant works of Renaissance literature. The texts are both minor but characteristic and canonical, from The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolphus and The Moral Philosophy of Doni, to Spenser's Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Pleasant Nights - Volume 1
Renowned today for his contribution to the rise of the modern European fairy tale, Giovan Francesco Straparola (c. 1480–c. 1557) is particularly known for his dazzling anthology The Pleasant Nights . Originally published in Venice in 1550 and 1553, this collection features seventy-three folk stories, fables, jests, and pseudo-histories, including nine tales we might now designate for ‘mature readers’ and seventeen proto-fairy tales. Nearly all of these stories, including classics such as ‘Puss in Boots,’ made their first ever appearance in this collection; together, the tales comprise one of the most varied and engaging Renaissance miscellanies ever produced. Its appeal sustained it through twenty-six editions in the first sixty years.
This full critical edition of The Pleasant Nights presents these stories in English for the first time in over a century. The text takes its inspiration from the celebrated Waters translation, which is entirely revised here to render it both more faithful to the original and more sparkishly idiomatic than ever before. The stories are accompanied by a rich sampling of illustrations, including originals from nineteenth-century English and French versions of the text.
As a comprehensive critical and historical edition, these volumes contain far more information on the stories than can be found in any existing studies, literary histories, or Italian editions of the work. Donald Beecher provides a lengthy introduction discussing Straparola as an author, the nature of fairy tales and their passage through oral culture, and how this phenomenon provides a new reservoir of stories for literary adaptation. Moreover, the stories all feature extensive commentaries analysing not only their themes but also their fascinating provenances, drawing on thousands of analogue tales going back to ancient Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic stories.
Immensely entertaining and readable, The Pleasant Nights will appeal to anyone interested in fairy tales, ancient stories, and folk creations. Such readers will also enjoy Beecher’s academically solid and erudite commentaries, which unfold in a manner as light and amusing as the stories themselves.
eBook
Renaissance Comedy
In this second volume of Renaissance Comedy , Donald Beecher presents six more of the best-known plays of the period, each with its own introduction, reading notes, and annotations. Beecher's general introduction, though stand-alone, complements and extends the historical and critical essay prefacing the first volume. Together, the eleven plays in both volumes illuminate the range, variety, and development of the Italian comedy.
The second volume of Renaissance Comedy raises fascinating questions about the uses of classical literature, the conventions of comedy, the politics of theatrical production, and the representation of contemporary social issues. Though it is clear that comedic plays exercised considerable influence over the development of European drama, these plays are above all remarkable for their sheer wit and invention, and their capacity to generate laughter and admiration in readers nearly half a millennium later.
eBook
The Scruffy Scoundrels
Annibal Caro wrote The Scruffy Scoundrels (Gli Straccioni) in Rome in early 1543 for his patron Pierluigi Farnese, the eldest son of Pope Paul III. Its performance was delayed, then canceled after the death of its patron. The play, which survives in a unique manuscript, is a masterpiece of humanist playwriting. The two “scruffy scoundrels,\" the love squabble between servants, the stock farcical routines, the comic invectives and the long pathetic side-tales all derive from the forms, plots and characters of ancient Roman comedy. Caro's play, set firmly in the streets of early modern Rome, is both a social satire and an endorsement of the civic and legal reforms promoted by the Farnese pope, Paul III. Introduction, bibliography, plot summary, notes.
eBook
