Introduction: Dialogues on the Decameron

Article | Contributor(s): Katherine A. Brown

The Merchant and the Sacred: Artifice and Realism in Decameron I.1

Article | Contributor(s): Susanna Barsella

By investigating the first novella of the Decameron from the perspective of the sacred this article questions the notion of realism as privileged key to the interpretation of Boccaccio’s style, poetics, and even philosophy in his major work. Although with different nuances of definition, realism...

Confession and Social Space in the Decameron

Article | Contributor(s): Katherine A. Brown

This essay argues that confession in the Decameron is a liminal activity, which affords characters and readers a milieu removed from the space of society in which transformation and ultimately a temporary moment of transcendence of the secular world (almost a return to paradise) are achieved. In...

What a Difference a Sea Makes in the Decameron: The Mediterranean, a Structural Space of the Novella

Article | Contributor(s): Roberta Morosini

This essay presents a reading of the Mediterranean sea as a narrative space in the Decameron. Through a reading of text and images, the paper illustrates the categories of mobile/static and foreign/domestic at work in the Decameron. It also introduces a third epistemological category, hybridity,...

Eros and Evanescence in the Decameron: The Weave of Love, Time, and Memory

Article | Contributor(s): Timothy Kircher

This essay studies the interplay between the emotion of love and the sense of its transience, as the interplay is featured in the three authorial interventions of the Proem, the Introduction to Day 4, and the Conclusion. The author returns time and again to this interplay, emphasizing the role of...

“Forgers of Falsehood, Physicians of Nought”: Retailing Fictions in Boccaccio’s Decameron

Article | Contributor(s): T. F. Gittes

Whereas Petrarch’s portrait of his doctor in Invectives Against a Physician is deliberately caricatural and seized at a glance, Boccaccio’s attitude towards doctors in the Decameron is far harder to grasp and easily overlooked. Yet, doctors and medical science are a central concern of the...

Fiction with Fiction: Confessing to Dante in Decameron I.1

Article | Contributor(s): Simone Marchesi

This essay addresses one specific element of Decameron I.1, the curious order in which the holy friar questions Ciappelletto in his confession, and relates it to the larger dialogue Boccaccio establishes with Dante’s Commedia. By avoiding the canonical models of confessing penitents, which...

A Singular Boccaccio: Defending Poetry in the Decameron and the Genealogie

Article | Contributor(s): Martin Eisner

This essay reconsiders the conventional division of Boccaccio’s career into two parts that is usually associated with his first meeting with Petrarch. Beginning with two fourteenth-century portraits of Boccaccio, it challenges this traditional account by calling attention to the continuities...

Review of Dante and the Seven Deadly Sins

Review | Contributor(s): Luca Fiorentini

Review of Studi sul Boccaccio

Review | Contributor(s): Laurie Shepard

Review of Sentieri nascosti: Studi sulla letteratura italiana dell’Otto-Novecento

Review | Contributor(s): Corrado Federici

Review of Novecento all’Indice. Gabriele D’Annunzio. I libri proibiti e i rapporti Stato-Chiesa all’ombra del Concordato

Review | Contributor(s): Maria Härmänmaa

Review of Pirandello in chiave esistenzialista

Review | Contributor(s): Giuseppe Faustini

Review of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The Artist and His Politics

Review | Contributor(s): Luca Somigli

Review of Totalitarian Art: The Visual Arts, Fascism(s) and Mass-society

Review | Contributor(s): Eloisa Morra

Review of La mia vita — la mia arte. My Life — My Artwork. Ma vie — mon oeuvre

Review | Contributor(s): Olga Zorzi Pugliese

Review of Italian Women’s Autobiographical Writings in the Twentieth Century. Constructing Subjects

Review | Contributor(s): Anne Urbancic

Review of Italo-Américains et Noirs à New York. Racisme ou lutte de reconnaissance?

Review | Contributor(s): Alessandro Loss

Introduzione [to Special cluster of Articles: Etica, impegno, letteratura: nuove figure / Ethics, Commitment, Literature: Contemporary Figurations]

Article | Contributor(s): Eugenio Bolongaro

Tondelli and the 1980s: Four Keywords for a Reassessment

Article | Contributor(s): Eugenio Bolongaro

This article challenges the interpretation of the 1980s in Italy as a period in which a large section of the population and, especially, the younger generation, turned away from politics and a retreated into the private sphere after the revolutionary ebullience of the 1960s and 1970s. The...