Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the Ethics of Desire
Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the Ethics of Desire

Author: Elena Borelli

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-03-30

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 1611479142

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This book focuses on the notion of desire in late-nineteenth-century Italy, and how this notion shapes the life and works of two of Italy’s most prominent authors at that time, Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D’Annunzio. In the fin de siècle, the philosophical speculation on desire, inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche intersected the popularization of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Within this context, desire is conceptualized as an obscure force and remnant of mankind’s animalistic origins. Both Pascoli and D’Annunzio put into play the drama of desire as a force splitting the unity of the characters in their works, and variously attempt to provide solutions to this haunting force within the human self.

The Medieval World of Nature
The Medieval World of Nature

Author: Joyce E. Salisbury

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-26

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0429584237

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Originally published in 1993, The Medieval World of Nature looks at how the natural world was viewed by medieval society. The book presents the argument that the pragmatic medieval view of the natural world of animals and plants, existed simply to serve medieval society. It discusses the medieval concept of animals as food, labour, and sport and addresses how the biblical charge of assuming dominion over animals and plants, was rooted in the medieval sensibility of control. The book also looks at the idea of plants and animals as not only pragmatic, but as allegories within the medieval world, utilizing animals to draw morality tales, which were viewed with as much importance as scientific information. This book provides a unique and interesting look at the everyday medieval world.

Dante as Dramatist
Dante as Dramatist

Author: Franco Masciandaro

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2016-11-11

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1512809519

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The overwhelming concentration on questions of allegory in Dante studies, Franco Masciandaro contends, has come at the expense of considerations of the poem's literal dimension. And while the dramatic quality of the Divine Comedy is often recognized, few critics have made it the object of sustained inquiry. In Dante as Dramatist, Masciandaro refocuses on the "poetry of the theater" in the Commedia by examining Dante's interpretation of the myth of the Earthly Paradise as it is represented in a number of key episodes of Inferno and Purgatorio. His principal objective is twofold: to analyze Dante's dramaturgy, especially the creative force of the tragic rhythm that the scenes under scrutiny produce as they succeed one another; and to show how Dante stages the action of the pilgrim's journey to the Earthly Paradise as the fundamental conflict between the dream of a future, second innocence, which ignores the tact of evil, and the recovery of another innocence, analogous to that found in Eden before the Fall. Dante as Dramatist will be of unique interest not only to students and scholars of Dante but also to those who study dramatic forms in literature and theories of the tragic.

The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy
The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy

Author: Douglas Biow

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1501726846

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Concerned about sanitation during a severe bout of plague in Milan, Leonardo da Vinci designed an ideal, clean city. Leonardo was far from alone among his contemporaries in thinking about personal and public hygiene, as Douglas Biow shows in The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy. A concern for cleanliness, he argues, was everywhere in the Renaissance.Anxieties about cleanliness were expressed in literature from humanist panegyrics to bawdy carnival songs, as well as in the visual arts. Biow surveys them all to explain why the topic so permeated Renaissance culture. At one level, cleanliness, he documents, was a matter of real concern in the Renaissance. At another, he finds, issues such as human dignity, self-respect, self-discipline, social distinction, and originality were rethought as a matter of artistic concern.The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy moves from the clean to the unclean, from the lofty to the base. Biow first examines the socially elevated, who defined and distinguished themselves as clean, pure, and polite. He then turns to soap, an increasingly common commodity in this period, and the figure of the washerwoman. Finally he focuses on latrines, which were universally scorned yet functioned artistically as figures of baseness, creativity, and fun in the works of Dante and Boccaccio. Paralleling this social stratification is a hierarchy of literary and visual artifacts, from the discourse of high humanism to filthy curses and scatological songs. Deftly bringing together high and low-as well as literary and visual-cultures, this book provides a fresh perspective on the Italian Renaissance and its artistic legacy.