Presented for the first time in a critical English edition, "Urania: A Romance" provides modern readers with a rare glimpse into the novel and novella forms at a time when narrative genres were not only being invented but, in the hands of women like Giulia Bigolina (1518?-1569?), used as vehicles for literary experimentation. The first known prose romance written by a woman in Italian, Bigolina's "Urania" centers on the monomaniacal love of a female character falling into melancholy when her beloved leaves her for a more beautiful woman. A tale that includes many of the conventions that...
Presented for the first time in a critical English edition, "Urania: A Romance" provides modern readers with a rare glimpse into the novel and novella...
The first original chivalric poem written by an Italian woman, "Floridoro" imbues a strong feminist ethos into a hypermasculine genre. Dotted with the usual characteristics-dark forests, illusory palaces, enchanted islands, seductive sorceresses"-Floridoro" is the story of the two greatest knights of a bygone age: the handsome Floridoro, who risks everything for love, and the beautiful Risamante, who helps women in distress while on a quest for her inheritance. Throughout, Moderata Fonte (1555-92) vehemently defends women's capacity to rival male prowess in traditionally male-dominated...
The first original chivalric poem written by an Italian woman, "Floridoro" imbues a strong feminist ethos into a hypermasculine genre. Dotted with the...
Drawing on a variety of psychoanalytic approaches, ten critics engage in exciting discussions of the ways the "inner life" is depicted in the Renaissance and the ways it is shown to interact with the "external" social and economic spheres. Spurred by the rise of capitalism and the nuclear family, Renaissance anxieties over changes in identity emerged in the period's unconscious--or, as Freud would have it, in its literature. Hence, much of Renaissance literature represents themes that have been prominent in the discourse of psychoanalysis: mistaken identity, incest, voyeurism, mourning,...
Drawing on a variety of psychoanalytic approaches, ten critics engage in exciting discussions of the ways the "inner life" is depicted in the Renai...
The controversy generated in Italy by the writings of Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso during the sixteenth century was the first historically important debate on what constitutes modern literature. Applying current critical theories and tools, the essays in "Renaissance Transactions" reexamine these two provocative poet-thinkers, the debate they inspired, and the reasons why that debate remains relevant today. Resituating these writers' works in the context of the Renaissance while also offering appraisals of their uncanny "postmodernity," the contributors to this volume focus...
The controversy generated in Italy by the writings of Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso during the sixteenth century was the first historically impo...
This distinctive collection explores the construction of genealogies--in both the biological sense of procreation and the metaphorical sense of heritage and cultural patrimony. Focusing specifically on the discourses that inform such genealogies, "Generation and Degeneration" moves from Greco-Roman times to the recent past to retrace generational fantasies and discords in a variety of related contexts, from the medical to the theological, and from the literary to the historical. The discourses on reproduction, biology, degeneration, legacy, and lineage that this book broaches not only...
This distinctive collection explores the construction of genealogies--in both the biological sense of procreation and the metaphorical sense of herita...
"The Manly Masquerade" unravels the complex ways men were defined as men in Renaissance Italy through readings of a vast array of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century evidence: medical and travel literature; theology; law; myth; conduct books; and plays, chivalric romances, and novellas by authors including Machiavelli, Tasso, and Ariosto. Valeria Finucci shows how ideas of masculinity were formed in the midst of acute anxiety about paternity by highlighting the beliefs--widely held at the time--that conception could occur without a paternal imprimatur or through a woman's encounter with an...
"The Manly Masquerade" unravels the complex ways men were defined as men in Renaissance Italy through readings of a vast array of sixteenth- and seven...
Analyzes how the body was constructed and politicized in early modern Italy by exploring literary discourses of the period - plays, novellas, travel journals, poems, etc.
Analyzes how the body was constructed and politicized in early modern Italy by exploring literary discourses of the period - plays, novellas, travel j...
Defining the proper female body, seeking elective surgery for beauty, enjoying lavish spa treatments, and combating impotence might seem like today's celebrity infatuations. However, these preoccupations were very much alive in the early modern period. Valeria Finucci recounts the story of a well-known patron of arts and music in Renaissance Italy, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua (1562-1612), to examine the culture, fears, and captivations of his times. Using four notorious moments in Vincenzo's life, Finucci explores changing concepts of sexuality, reproduction, beauty, and...
Defining the proper female body, seeking elective surgery for beauty, enjoying lavish spa treatments, and combating impotence might seem like today...
The controversy generated in Italy by the writings of Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso during the sixteenth century was a historically important debate on what constitutes modern literature. This book re-examines these two poet-thinkers, the debate they inspired, and the reasons why that debate remains relevant.
The controversy generated in Italy by the writings of Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso during the sixteenth century was a historically important de...
Exploring the construction of genealogies, this work retraces generational fantasies and discords in a variety of related contexts, from the medical to the theological, and from the literary to the historical. It brings to the forefront concepts of sexual identity and gender politics and is for those in history of medicine, and religious studies.
Exploring the construction of genealogies, this work retraces generational fantasies and discords in a variety of related contexts, from the medical t...
