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InThe Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, Jo Ann Cavallo attempts a new interpretation of the history of the renaissance romance epic in northern Italy, focusing on the period's three major chivalric poets. Cavallo challenges previous critical assumptions about the trajectory of the romance genre, especially regarding questions of creative imitation, allegory, ideology, and political engagement. In tracing the development of the romance epic against the historical context of the Ferrarese court and the Italian peninsula, Cavallo moves from a politically engaged Boiardo, whose poem promotes the tenets of humanism, to an individualistic Tasso, who opposed the repressive aspects of the counter-reformation culture he is often thought to represent. Ariosto is read from the vantage of his predecessor Boiardo, and Cavallo describes his cynicism and later mellowing attitude toward the real-world relevance of his and Boiardo's fiction.The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tassois the first critical study to bring together the three poets in a coherent vision that maps changes while uncovering continuities.

Dante put Muhammad in one of the lowest circles of Hell. At the same time, the medieval Christian poet placed several Islamic philosophers much more honorably in Limbo. Furthermore, it has long been suggested that for much of the basic framework of the Divine Comedy Dante was indebted to apocryphal traditions about a \"night journey\" taken by Muhammad. Dante scholars have increasingly returned to the question of Islam to explore the often surprising encounters among religious traditions that the Middle Ages afforded. This collection of essays works through what was known of the Qur'an and of Islamic philosophy and science in Dante's day and explores the bases for Dante's images of Muhammad and Ali. It further compels us to look at key instances of engagement among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

'And by now, mind, it's too late to redeem your debts by giving up guzzling.' Dante's poetic correspondence (or tenzone) with Forese Donati, a relative of his wife, was rife with crude insults: the two men derided one another on topics ranging from sexual dysfunction and cowardice to poverty and thievery. But in his Commedia, rather than denying this correspondence, Dante repeatedly acknowledged and evoked the memory of his youthful put-downs.Dante's Tenzone with Forese Donati examines the lasting impact of these sonnets on Dante's writings and Italian literary culture, notably in the work of Giovanni Boccaccio. Fabian Alfie expands on derision as an ethical dimension of medieval literature, both facilitating the reprehension of vice and encouraging ongoing debates about the true nature of nobility. Outlining a broad perspective on the uses of literary insult, Dante's Tenzone with Forese Donati also provides an evocative glimpse of Dante's day-to-day life in the twelfth century.

Looney's elegant, careful translation provides us with the first extensive selection of Ariosto's prose works in English, and enriches our understanding of one of Italy's most important Renaissance writers.

Dante Alighieri cited the Bible extensively in his Commedia , but also used his epic poem to meditate on the meaning of the Scriptures as a 'true' text. The Biblical Dante provides close readings of passages from the Commedia to explore how Dante's concept of Biblical truth differs sharply from modern notions. V. Stanley Benfell examines Dante's argument that the truth of the sacred text could only be revealed when engaged with in a transformative manner - and that a lack of such encounters in his time had led to a rise in greed and corruption, notably within the Church. He also illustrates how the poet put forth a vision for the restoration of a just society using Biblical language and imagery, revealing ideas of both earthly and eternal happiness. The Biblical Dante provides an insightful analysis of attitudes towards both the Bible and how it was read in the Medieval period.

Translated here for the first time into English, Sergio Zatti'sThe Quest for Epicis a selection of studies on the two major poets of the Italian Renaissance, Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, by one of the most important literary critics writing in Italy today. An original and challenging work,The Quest for Epicdocuments the development of Italian narrative from the chivalric romance at the end of the fifteenth century to the genre of epic in the sixteenth century. Zatti focuses on Ariosto'sOrlando Furioso, written in the early 1500s, and progresses to Tasso'sJerusalem Delivered, written at the end of the century, but also touches briefly on Boiardo, Ariosto's great predecessor at the Estense court in Ferrara, as well as on Pulci, Trissino, and many other Italian writers of the period. Zatti highlights the critical debates over narrative form in the sixteenth century that become signposts on the way to literary modernity and the eventual rise of the modern novel. Albert Russell Ascoli's introduction provides context by mapping Zatti's criticism and situating it among Italian and Anglo-American literary critical studies, making a case for the contribution this book will have for English-language readers.

For the first time in English, readers can now evaluate the extraordinary breadth of César Vallejo’s diverse oeuvre that, in addition to poetry, includes magazine and newspaper articles, chronicles, political reports, fictions, plays, letters, and notebooks. Edited by the translator Joseph Mulligan, Selected Writings follows Vallejo down his many winding roads, from Santiago de Chuco in highland Peru, to the coastal cities of Trujillo and Lima, on to Paris, Madrid, Moscow, and Leningrad. This repeated border-crossing also plays out on the textual level, as Vallejo wrote prolifically across genres and, in many cases, created poetic space in extra-literary modes. Informed by a vast body of scholarly research, this compendium synthesizes a restored literary corpus and—in bold translations that embrace the idiosyncratic spirit of the author’s writing—puts forth a new representation of this essential figure of twentieth-century Latin American literature as an indispensable alternative to the European avant-garde. Compiling well known versions with over eighty percent of the text presented in English translation for the first time, Selected Writings is both a trove of and tribute to Vallejo’s multifaceted work. Includes translations by the editor and Clayton Eshleman, Pierre Joris, Suzanne Jill Levine, Nicole Peyrafitte, Michael Lee Rattigan, William Rowe, Eliot Weinberger, and Jason Weiss.

In the later Middle Ages, many writers claimed that prose is superior to verse as a vehicle of knowledge because it presents the truth in an unvarnished form, without the distortions of meter and rhyme. Beginning in the thirteenth century, works of verse narrative from the early Middle Ages were recast in prose, as if prose had become the literary norm. Instead of dying out, however, verse took on new vitality. In France verse texts were produced, in both French and Occitan, with the explicit intention of transmitting encyclopedic, political, philosophical, moral, historical, and other forms of knowledge. InKnowing Poetry, Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay explore why and how verse continued to be used to transmit and shape knowledge in France. They cover the period between Jean de Meun'sRoman de la rose(c. 1270) and the major work of Jean Bouchet, the last of the grands rhétoriqueurs (c. 1530). The authors find that the advent of prose led to a new relationship between poetry and knowledge in which poetry serves as a medium for serious reflection and self-reflection on subjectivity, embodiment, and time. They propose that three major works-theRoman de la rose, theOvide moralisé, and Boethius'Consolation of Philosophy-form a single influential matrix linking poetry and intellectual inquiry, metaphysical insights, and eroticized knowledge. The trio of thought-world-contingency, poetically represented by Philosophy, Nature, and Fortune, grounds poetic exploration of reality, poetry, and community.

In the ancient world, friendship was a virtue of great philosophical importance. Aristotle wrote extensively about it, as did Cicero. Their conception of friendship as a relationship based on reason and virtue was transformed by Christianity into a connection based on the mutual love of an individual and God.In Dante's Idea of Friendship, Filippa Modesto offers sharp readings of the Commedia, Vita Nuova, and Convivio that demonstrate Dante's interest in that theme. Drawing on a lucid and wide-ranging examination of the literature on friendship, she shows how he weaved together the contradictory classical and the Christian concepts of friendship into a harmonious synthesis in which friendship became a handmaiden to salvation and happiness. A fresh, perceptive interpretation of Dante's works, Dante's Idea of Friendship will engage medievalists, classicists, and scholars of friendship throughout the ages.

In her 2007 poem cycle Niemands Frau, Barbara Köhler returns to Homer's Odyssey, not to retell it, but to take up some of the threads it has woven into the cultural tradition of the West - and to unravel them, just as Penelope, the wife of the hero who called himself Nobody, unravelled each night the web she re-wove by day. Köhler's return to the Odyssey takes place under the sign of a grammatical shift, from 'er' to 'sie', from the singular hero to a plurality of female voices - Nausicaa, Circe, Calypso, Ino Leucothea, Helen and Penelope herself - with implications for thinking about identity, power and knowledge, about gender and relationality, but also about the corporeality and multivocality which underlies the 'virtual reality' of the printed text. The eight essays in this volume explore Köhler's iridescent poem cycle from a variety of different angles: its context in contemporary German refigurations of the classical; its engagement with Homer and the classical tradition; its contribution to feminist philosophy of the subject and a female 'dialectic of enlightenment'; its incorporation of the voices of poetic predecessors; and the surprising alliance it uncovers between poetry and quantum theory.