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. Moving from the lyric origins of the Divine Comedy in “Dante and the Lyric Past” to Petrarch’s regressive stance on gender in “Notes Toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature” – and encompassing, among others, Giacomo da Lentini, Guido Cavalcanti, and Guittone d’Arezzo – these sixteen essays by one of our leading critics frame the literary culture of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy in fresh, illuminating ways that will prove useful and instructive to students and scholars alike.
Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. Pp. 475
