Text and Document in Dante’s Vita nova

2021 ◽  
Vol 112 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-23
Author(s):  
Dario Del Puppo

Abstract This article considers the importance of material philological features of the early manuscripts of Dante’s Vita nova for the work’s critical reception. Over the centuries, editors (most notably Giovanni Boccaccio) have recast textual meaning in the work mainly by marginalizing the poet’s glosses and by reformatting the poems. Attention to the material features of the earliest extant manuscript of the Vita nova (MS Martelli 12) with respect to later copies, however, prompts us to consider the creative interplay between Dante’s prosimetrum and the material features of the manuscript. To interpret a text critically is to acknowledge and to examine also how a manuscript or print edition orients textual interpretation. The editorial history of the Vita nova teaches us about the cultural processes and discourses of literary culture and about Italian literary history.

Author(s):  
Rachel Carroll

This chapter examines a critically overlooked literary fiction by an Irish writer whose legacy has tended to be overshadowed by the modernist generation which succeeded him. George Moore’s Albert Nobbs depicts the lives of not one but two female-bodied men working in a Dublin hotel in the 1860s. It provides an alternative origin for a literary history of transgender representation, with an emphasis on lived experience and social reality rather than the historical fantasy of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, published ten years later. This chapter aims to articulate the ‘transgender capacity’ (David Getsy, 2014) of Moore’s novella, exploring the insights it offers into the social and economic functions of gender. Simone Benmussa’s 1977 stage adaptation, The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, has been canonised as a classic of feminist theatre; reflection on its critical reception reveals the ways in which transgender motifs have been interpreted in Second Wave feminist contexts.


2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karla Mallette

AbstractThis article sketches a theoretical strategy for approaching the literary history of Norman Sicily (centuries XI-XII). Because of its linguistic complexity—during the Norman era, Sicilians wrote in Arabic, Greek, and Latin—literary historians have resisted treating Siculo-Norman literature as a literary-historical category. Rather, the literature has been divided into three discrete, linguistically defined traditions, understood as colonial extensions of mainland literary traditions. Using a reading of Sicilian coins with multilingual inscriptions in order to examine the parallel use of multiple languages in a single "text," this article argues for a reconsideration of Sicilian literature of the era, one that looks at multilingualism not as a challenge to literary coherence but as constitutive of a literary culture.


Author(s):  
Jane Gilbert ◽  
Simon Gaunt ◽  
William Burgwinkle

The field of medieval francophone literary culture outside France was for many years a minor and peripheral sub-field of medieval French literary studies (or, in the case of Anglo-Norman, of English studies). The past two decades, however, have seen a major reassessment of the use of French in England, in the Low Countries, in Italy, and in the eastern Mediterranean, and this impacts significantly upon the history of literature in French more generally. This book is the first to look at the question overall, rather than just at one region. It also takes a more sustained theorized approach than other studies, drawing particularly on Derrida and on Actor-Network Theory. It discusses a wide range of texts, some of which have hitherto been regarded as marginal to French literary history, and makes the case for this material being more central to the literary history of French than was allowed in more traditional approaches, focused narrowly on ‘France’. Many of the arguments in Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad are grounded in readings of texts in manuscript (rather than in modern critical editions), and sustained attention is paid throughout to manuscripts that were produced or travelled outside the kingdom of France.


Migration and Modernities recovers a comparative literary history of migration by bringing together scholars from the US and Europe to explore the connections between migrant experiences and the uneven emergence of modernity. The collection initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demonstrating how mobility unsettles the geographic boundaries, temporal periodization, and racial categories we often use to organize literary and historical study. Migrants are by definition liminal, and many have existed historically in the spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities. In exploring these spaces, Migration and Modernities also investigates the origins of current debates about belonging, rights, and citizenship. Its chapters traverse the globe, revealing the experiences — real or imagined — of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. They explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others. These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-218
Author(s):  
Marko Juvan ◽  
Joh Dokler

This article presents methodological starting points, heuristics and the results of a GIS-based analysis of the history of Slovenian literary culture from the 1780s to 1941. The ethnically Slovenian territory was multilingual and multicultural; it belonged to different state entities with distant capitals, which was reflected in the spatial dynamic of literary culture. The research results have confirmed the hypotheses of the research project ‘The Space of Slovenian Literary Culture,’ which were based on postulates of the spatial turn: the socio-geographical space influenced the development of literature and its media, whereas literature itself, through its discourse, practices and institutions, had a reciprocal influence on the apprehension and structuring of that space, as well as on its connection with the broader region. Slovenian literary discourse was able to manifest itself in public predominantly through the history of spatial factors: (a) the formation, territorial expansion and concentration of the social network of literary actors and media; (b) the persistent references of literary texts to places that were recognized by addressees as Slovenian, thereby grounding a national ideology. Taking all of this into account, and based on meta-theoretical reflection, the project aims to contribute to the development of digital humanities and spatial literary studies.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 234-250
Author(s):  
Stephen Cheeke

This article argues for the centrality of notions of personality and persons in the work of Walter Pater and asks how this fits in with his critical reception. Pater's writing is grounded in ideas of personality and persons, of personification, of personal gods and personalised history, of contending voices, and of the possibility of an interior conversation with the logos. Artworks move us as personalities do in life; the principle epistemological analogy is with the knowledge of persons – indeed, ideas are only grasped through the form they take in the individuals in whom they are manifested. The conscience is outwardly embodied in other persons, but also experienced as a conversation with a person inhabiting the most intimate and sovereign dimension of the self. Even when personality is conceived as the walls of a prison-house, it remains a powerful force, able to modify others. This article explores the ways in which these questions are ultimately connected to the paradoxes of Pater's own person and personality, and to the matter of his ‘style’.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-219
Author(s):  
Wely Dozan ◽  
Muhammad Turmudzi

Lately, the concept of the methodology of interpreting the texts of the Qur’an is not only struggling from the history of the Companions and the Tabi'in but in understanding the Word of God it is necessary to have dialectics with the interpretation of the text with the term hermeneutics. Some contemporary interpretations make a new study of the Qur’an using the hermeneutic approach. Specifically, this paper seeks to contribute to providing concepts related to hermeneutics as a textual interpretation methodology. There are some things that are very urgent to be studied in this discussion, including, First, hermeneutics as a dialectic of text interpretation. Second, the methodology of the hermeneutic approach in understanding texts. Third, the application of hermeneutics as a text interpretation. Thus, the concept of hermeneutics in the texts is to find the Qur'anic values ​​contextually behind the meaning of the text of the verse. 


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