Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture

Contents

Contents Introduction Reading Against the Grain: Musings of an Italianist, from the Astral to the Artisanal 1 i . a p h i l o s o p h y o f d e s i r e 1. Dante and the Lyric Past 23 2. Guittone’s Ora parrà, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire 47 3. Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyric and Autobiographical Context 70 4. Medieval Multiculturalism and Dante’s Theology of Hell 102 i i . c h r i s t i a n a n d p a g a n i n t e r t e x t s 5. Why Did Dante Write the Commedia? Dante and the Visionary Tradition 125 6. Minos’s Tail: The Labor of Devising Hell (Aeneid 6.431–33 and Inferno 5.1–24) 132 7. Q: Does Dante Hope for Vergil’s Salvation? A: Why Do We Care? For the Very Reason We Should Not Ask the Question 151 8. Arachne, Argus, and St. John: Transgressive Art in Dante and Ovid 158 i i i . o r d e r i n g t h e m a c r o t e x t : t i m e a n d n a r r a t i v e 9. Cominciandomi dal principio infino a la fine: Forging Anti-narrative in the Vita nuova 175 Contents viii 10. The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 193 11. The Wheel of the Decameron 224 12. Editing Dante’s Rime and Italian Cultural History: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca . . . Barbi, Contini, Foster-Boyde, De Robertis 245 i v . g e n d e r 13. Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron (Decameron 2.9, 2.10, 5.10) 281 14. Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, and Gender 304 15. Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo (With a Brief Excursus on Cecco d’Ascoli) 333 16. Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrix Loquax 360 Notes 379 Index 467 ...