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Manuscript Poetics explores the interrelationship between the material features of textual artifacts and the literary aspects of the medieval Italian texts they preserve. This original study is both an investigation into the material foundations of literature and a reflection on notions of textuality, writing, and media in late medieval and early modern Italy. Francesco Marco Aresu examines the book-objects of manuscripts and early printed editions, asking questions about the material conditions of production, circulation, and reception of literary works. He invites scholars to reconcile reading with seeing (and with touching) and to challenge contemporary presumptions about technological ne...
Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls and play The Government Inspector revolutionized Russian literature and continue to entertain generations of readers around the world. Yet Gogol’s peculiar genius comes through most powerfully in his short stories. By turns—or at once—funny, terrifying, and profound, the tales collected in The Nose and Other Stories are among the greatest achievements of world literature. These stories showcase Gogol’s vivid, haunting imagination: an encounter with evil in a darkened church, a downtrodden clerk who dreams only of a new overcoat, a nose that falls off a face and reappears around town on its own, outranking its former owner. Written between 1831 and 1...
This book explores literary and non-literary texts, along with their early manuscripts and subsequent printed and digital editions, covering a time span extending over 1000 years.
The most important poetry reference for more than four decades—now fully updated for the twenty-first century Through three editions over more than four decades, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has built an unrivaled reputation as the most comprehensive and authoritative reference for students, scholars, and poets on all aspects of its subject: history, movements, genres, prosody, rhetorical devices, critical terms, and more. Now this landmark work has been thoroughly revised and updated for the twenty-first century. Compiled by an entirely new team of editors, the fourth edition—the first new edition in almost twenty years—reflects recent changes in literary and cultu...
A reassessment of how the legacy of ancient philosophy functioned in early modern Europe In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle affirms that despite his friendship with Plato, he was a better friend of the truth. With this statement, he rejected his teacher's authority, implying that the pursuit of philosophy does not entail any such obedience. Yet over the centuries Aristotle himself became the authority par excellence in the Western world, and even notorious anti-Aristotelians such as Galileo Galilei preferred to keep him as a friend rather than to contradict him openly. In Early Modern Aristotle, Eva Del Soldato contends that because the authority of Aristotle—like that of any other ancie...
This original volume proposes a novel way of reading Dante’s Vita nova, exemplified in a rich diversity of scholarly approaches to the text. This groundbreaking volume represents the fruit of a two-year-long series of international seminars aimed at developing a fresh way of reading Dante’s Vita nova. By analyzing each of its forty-two chapters individually, focus is concentrated on the Vita nova in its textual and historical context rather than on its relationship to the Divine Comedy. This decoupling has freed the contributors to draw attention to various important literary features of the text, including its rich and complex polysemy, as well as its structural fluidity. The volume lik...
The first English translation of Petrarch’s Psalms and Prayers provides an intimate look at the personal devotions of the “Father of Humanism.” Throughout Petrarch’s work, there is an undercurrent of tension between the secular and the sacred. In this captivating new translation of the Psalms and the Prayers, Demetrio Yocum turns to a previously overlooked area of Petrarchan studies to open a window on the scholar’s innermost religious thoughts. Petrarch's Psalms and Prayers are intricately crafted poetic and devotional works, presented in facing Latin/English format. In his extensive introduction and commentary, Yocum situates these bold, original compositions within their historical, literary, and religious contexts, deftly drawing connections to classical texts, the Bible and the writings of the church fathers, and Petrarch’s own life, work, and poetics. This remarkable first-ever English translation of the Psalms and Prayers helps to reconcile Petrarch’s classical humanism with his devout, deeply personal Christianity.
The Early Printed Illustrations of Dante’s “Commedia” provides the first systematic overview of the earliest illustrated editions of Dante’s poem, stretching from 1481 through 1596, and features over 230 illustrations. Developing a series of interdisciplinary methods for studying early printed book illustrations, Matthew Collins explores the visual sources for the first illustrated editions of the Commedia, their narrative qualities, and their influence on Renaissance readers. He traces the visual genealogies that link these images to each other and to renderings of the poem in other media, including illuminated manuscripts and drawings, such as those by Sandro Botticelli. Collins ad...
Manuscript Poetics explores the interrelationship between the material features of textual artifacts and the literary aspects of the medieval Italian texts they preserve. This original study is both an investigation into the material foundations of literature and a reflection on notions of textuality, writing, and media in late medieval and early modern Italy. Francesco Marco Aresu examines the book-objects of manuscripts and early printed editions, asking questions about the material conditions of production, circulation, and reception of literary works. He invites scholars to reconcile reading with seeing (and with touching) and to challenge contemporary presumptions about technological ne...