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This volume breaks new ground in the exploration of Anglo-Italian cultural relations: it presents analyses of a wide range of early modern Italian texts adapted into contemporary English culture, often through intermediary French translations. When transposed into English, their Italian origin was frequently categorized as marvellous and consequently censured because of its strangeness: thus, English translators often gave their public a moralized and tamed version of Italy’s uniqueness. This volume’s contributors show that an effective way of moralizing Italian custom was to exoticize its origins, in order to protect the English public from an Italianate influence. This ubiquitous moralization is visible in the evolution of the concept of tragedy, and in the overtly educational aim acquired by the Italian novella, adapted for an allegedly female audience. Through the analysis of various literary genres (novella, epic poem, play, essay), the volume focuses on the mechanisms of appropriation and rejection of Italian culture through imported topoi and narremes.
Shows how medieval Italian poets viewed their authorship of poetry as a function of their engagement in a human community.
The Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio has had a long and colourful history in English translation. This new interdisciplinary study presents the first exploration of the reception of Boccaccio’s writings in English literary culture, tracing his presence from the early fifteenth century to the 1930s. Guyda Armstrong tells this story through a wide-ranging journey through time and space – from the medieval reading communities of Naples and Avignon to the English court of Henry VIII, from the censorship of the Decameron to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, from the world of fine-press printing to the clandestine pornographers of 1920s New York, and much more. Drawing on the disciplines of book history, translation studies, comparative literature, and visual studies, the author focuses on the book as an object, examining how specific copies of manuscripts and printed books were presented to an English readership by a variety of translators. Armstrong is thereby able to reveal how the medieval text in translation is remade and re-authorized for every new generation of readers.
A multi-authored study of the emergence and transmission of fictional writing in Europe in the seventeenth century, with the aim of improving understanding of the origins of the novel.
Long celebrated as one of “the Three Crowns” of Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) experimented widely with the forms of literature. His prolific and innovative writings—which range beyond the novella, from lyric to epic, from biography to mythography and geography, from pastoral and romance to invective—became powerful models for authors in Italy and across the Continent. This collection of essays presents Boccaccio’s life and creative output in its encyclopedic diversity. Exploring a variety of genres, Latin as well as Italian, it provides short descriptions of all his works, situates them in his oeuvre, and features critical expositions of their most salient features and i...
This book is the first comprehensive study of images of rape in Italian painting at the dawn of the Renaissance. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Péter Bokody examines depictions of sexual violence in religion, law, medicine, literature, politics, and history writing produced in kingdoms (Sicily and Naples) and city-republics (Florence, Siena, Lucca, Bologna and Padua). Whilst misogynistic endorsement characterized many of these visual discourses, some urban communities condemned rape in their propaganda against tyranny. Such representations of rape often link gender and aggression to war, abduction, sodomy, prostitution, pregnancy, and suicide. Bokody also traces how the new naturalism in painting, introduced by Giotto, increased verisimilitude, but also fostered imagery that coupled eroticism and violation. Exploring images and texts that have long been overlooked, Bokody's study provides new insights at the intersection of gender, policy, and visual culture, with evident relevance to our contemporary condition.
Directs scholarly focus towards a deeper appreciation of medievalist trends in the Elizabethan literary landscape and challenges traditional narratives of 'modernity'. Themes and motifs from the Middle Ages are found across the drama, poetry, prose fiction, polemic, and satire of the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, but their impact and influence on this literary landscape have rarely been considered. This study offers a nuanced examination of this intricate interplay between pre-Reformation culture and its post-Reformation reception in England. Each chapter explores a particular genre or aspect of medievalism at play in this writing: civic medievalism; literary adaptation and sa...
This volume revisits Genette’s definition of the printed book’s liminal devices, or paratexts, as ‘thresholds of interpretation’ by focussing specifically on translations produced in Britain in the early age of print (1473-1660). At a time when translation played a major role in shaping English and Scottish literary culture, paratexts afforded translators and their printers a privileged space in which to advertise their activities, display their social and ideological affiliations, influence literary tastes, and fashion Britain’s representations of the cultural ‘other’. Written by an international team of scholars of translation and material culture, the ten essays in the volume examine the various material shapes, textual forms, and cultural uses of paratexts as markers (and makers) of cultural exchange in early modern Britain. The collection will be of interest to scholars of early modern translation, print, and literary culture, and, more broadly, to those studying the material and cultural aspects of text production and circulation in early modern Europe.
This collection underscores the role played by translated books in the early modern period. Individual essays aim to highlight the international nature of Renaissance culture and the way in which translators were fundamental agents in the formation of literary canons. This volume introduces readers to a pan-European story while considering various aspects of the book trade, from typesetting and bookselling to editing and censorship. The result is a multifaceted survey of transnational phenomena.
Reconsidering Boccaccio explores the exceptional social, geographic, and intellectual range of the Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio, his dialogue with voices and traditions that surrounded him, and the way that his legacy illuminates the interconnectivity of numerous cultural networks.