Important Links
Italian General Library Guide
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Library Resources
- Oxford Bibliographies This link opens in a new windowLiterary guide to significant sources on a variety of subjects. Works as an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia.
- Britannica This link opens in a new windowAuthoritative references, including articles from the print Encyclopædia Britannica, articles specially written for Britannica Online, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the Britannica Book of the Year, etc.
Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies by Call Number: Central Library Stacks: PQ4006 .E536 2007 v.1-v.2The Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studiesis 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.
Dante Encyclopedia by Call Number: Central Library Stacks PQ4333 .D36 2010ISBN: 9780415876117Publication Date: 2010-02-18The Dante Encyclopedia is a comprehensive resource that presents a systematic introduction to Dante's life and works and the cultural context in which his moral and intellectual imagination took shape.
The Cambridge Companion to Dante's 'Commedia'
This newly commissioned volume presents a focused overview of Dante's masterpiece, the Commedia, offering readers of today wide-ranging insights into the poem and its core features. Leading scholars discuss matters of structure, narrative, language and style, characterization, doctrine, and politics, in chapters that make their own contributions to Dante criticism by raising problems and questions that call for renewed attention, while investigating contextual concerns as well as the current state of criticism about the poem.
The City of Poetry : imagining the civic role of the poet in fourteenth-century Italy
What did it mean to be a poet in fourteenth-century Italy? What counted as poetry? In an effort to answer these questions, this book examines the careers of four medieval Italian poets (Albertino Mussato, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio) who wrote in both Latin and the Italian vernacular. In readings of defenses of poetry, speeches and letters on public laurel-crowning ceremonies, and other theoretical and poetic texts, this book shows how these poets viewed their authorship of poetic works as a function of their engagement in a human community. Each poet represents a model of the poet as a public intellectual - a poet-theologian - who can intervene in public affairs thanks to his authority within texts.
Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture
In this book, Teodolinda Barolini explores the sources of Italian literary culture in the figures of its lyric poets and its "three crowns": Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Barolini views the origins of Italian literary culture through four prisms: the ideological/philosophical, the intertextual/multicultural, the structural/formal, and the social.
Dante and the Sense of Transgression : 'the trespass of the sign'
In "Dante and the Sense of Transgression," William Franke combines literary-critical analysis with philosophical and theological reflection to cast new light on Dante's poetic vision. Conversely, Dante's medieval masterpiece becomes our guide to rethinking some of the most pressing issues of contemporary theory. Beyond suggestive archetypes like Adam and Ulysses that hint at an obsession with transgression beneath Dante's overt suppression of it, there is another and a prior sense in which transgression emerges as Dante's essential and ultimate gesture. His work as a poet culminates in the "Paradiso" in a transcendence of language towards a purely ineffable, mystical experience beyond verbal expression.
Dante: the Divine Comedy
In this accessible critical introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy Robin Kirkpatrick principally focuses on Dante as a poet and storyteller. He addresses important questions such as Dante's attitude towards Virgil, and demonstrates how an early work such as the Vita nuova is a principal source of the literary achievement of the Comedy. His detailed reading reveals how the great narrative poem explores the relationship that Dante believed to exist between God as creator of the universe and the human being as a creature of God. In addition, Kirkpatrick takes due account of the historical and philosophical dimensions of the poem.
Dante in Context
In the past seven centuries Dante has become world renowned, with his works translated into multiple languages and read by people of all ages and cultural backgrounds. This volume brings together interdisciplinary essays by leading, international scholars to provide a comprehensive account of the historical, cultural and intellectual context in which Dante lived and worked: from the economic, social and political scene to the feel of daily life; from education and religion to the administration of justice; from medicine to philosophy and science; from classical antiquity to popular culture; and from the dramatic transformation of urban spaces to the explosion of visual arts and music.
Dante's Commedia Elements of Structure
Originally published in 1977. This book contains four essays by Professor Charles Singleton: "Allegory," "Symbolism," "The Pattern at the Center," and "The Substance of Things Seen." These four essays treat four dimensions of meaning essential to understanding the substance and special texture of the poetry of the Divine Comedy. One might speak of "facets" or "aspects" of meaning if such terms did not suggest surface reflections dependent on the way a work (as a jewel) is turned for inspection. But for Singleton, each dimension has a depth that reaches to the core and substance of Dante's poetry, so they are, in Singleton's view, elements of its structure.
Dante's Idea of Friendship: the transformation of a classical concept
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.
The Divine comedy and the Encyclopedia of arts and sciences
The guiding principle of this volume is the concept of the artes liberales, the trivium and quadrivium, as branches of learning that are rooted in Dante Alighieri's mind. The present volume contains essays by leading international scholars on the various scientific and artistic disciplines which form the background, sources, and presence in Dante's opus.
The History of Italy
This concise, and clearly written account explores Italian history and culture from the Etruscans to the present day. Starting with an introduction providing data on Italy's geography, people, and current government, the book examines the political and cultural history of the country in eleven chapters. Readers will discover the Romans, Lombards, popes, Guelphs, Ghibbellines, the Medici, the Risorgimento, sculptors, composers, Fascists, Christian Democrats, and many other people and events of Italy's rich history. Included are a biographical section with portraits of noteworthy Italians, an extensive bibliographical essay, a glossary of terms, and an index, making this book the most complete and up-to-date general history of the nation available.
Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation
"Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation" gathers together, for the first time in one volume, newly translated primary sources critical to the study of the Italian Middle Ages, ca. 1000-1400 C.E.
The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy
Joan Ferrante analyzes the "Divine Comedy" in terms of public issues, which continued foremost in Dante's thinking after his exile from Florence. Professor Ferrante examines the political concepts of the poem in historical context and in light of the political theory and controversies of the period.
Textual Cultures of Medieval Italy: Essays from the 41st Conference on Editorial Problems
The essays in Textual Cultures of Medieval Italy consider how distinct habits of writing took root among specific communities in Italy between the early Middle Ages and the eve of the Renaissance.
Vernacular Translation in Dante's Italy: illiterate literature
Translation and commentary are often associated with institutions and patronage; but in Italy around the time of Dante, widespread vernacular translation was mostly on the spontaneous initiative of individuals. While Dante is usually the starting point for histories of vernacular translation in Europe, this book demonstrates that The Divine Comedy places itself in opposition to a vast vernacular literature already in circulation among its readers. Alison Cornish explores the anxiety of vernacularization as expressed by translators and contemporary authors, the prevalence of translation in religious experience, the role of scribal mediation, the influence of the Italian reception of French literature on that literature, and how translating into the vernacular became a project of nation-building only after its virtual demise during the Humanist period.
The Ancient Flame: Dante and the poets
While the structure and themes of the Divine Comedy are defined by the narrative of a spiritual pilgrimage guided by Christian truth, Winthrop Wetherbee's remarkable new study reveals that Dante's engagement with the great Latin poets Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius constitutes a second, complementary narrative centered on psychological and artistic self-discovery. This fresh, illuminating approach departs from the usual treatment of classical poets in Dante criticism, which assigns them a merely allegorical function.
Dante's Interpretive Journey
Critically engaging the thought of Heidegger, Gadamer, and others, William Franke contributes both to the criticism of Dante's Divine Comedy and to the theory of interpretation. Reading the poem through the lens of hermeneutical theory, Franke focuses particularly on Dante's address to the reader as the site of a disclosure of truth. The event of the poem for its reader becomes potentially an experience of truth both human and divine. While contemporary criticism has concentrated on the historical character of Dante's poem, often insisting on it as undermining the poem's claims to transcendence, Franke argues that precisely the poem's historicity forms the ground for its mediation of a religious revelation. Dante's dramatization, on an epic scale, of the act of interpretation itself participates in the self-manifestation of the Word in poetic form.
Dante and Renaissance Florence
Simon Gilson explores Dante's reception in his native Florence between 1350 and 1481. He traces the development of Florentine civic culture and the interconnections between Dante's principal 'Florentine' readers, from Giovanni Boccaccio to Cristoforo Landino, and explains how and why both supporters and opponents of Dante exploited his legacy for a variety of ideological, linguistic, cultural and political purposes. The book focuses on a variety of texts, both Latin and vernacular, in which reference was made to Dante, from commentaries to poetry, from literary lives to letters, from histories to dialogues. Gilson pays particular attention to Dante's influence on major authors such as Boccaccio and Petrarch, on Italian humanism, and on civic identity and popular culture in Florence.
