The Genius to Improve an Invention derives its title from John Dryden’s phrase for the British tendency to take up literary masterpieces from the past and “perfect” them. Distinguished literary schola
In this slim, poetically powerful volume, Piero Boitani develops his earlier work in The Bible and Its Rewritings, focusing on Shakespeare’s “rescripturing” of the Gospels. Boitani persuasively urges
Professor Boitani's latest book explores the areas of the tragic and the sublime in medieval literature by asking what medieval texts mean to modern readers. Boitani, who has written widely on medieval and comparative literature, studies tragic and sublime tensions in stories and scenes recounted by such major poets as Dante, Chaucer and Petrarch, as well as themes shared by writers and philosophers and traditional poetic images. The result is a learned, stimulating, and wide-ranging volume of studies in comparative European literature, which takes into account poems written in English, Italian and other languages, and compares them with their classical and biblical ancestors as well as with their modern descendants.
Published for the Society for Italian Studies, the essays describes how Dante liberally distributed throughout his Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven various members of the Donati family, which was infamous
This is a wide-ranging and detailed study of English narrative verse in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Piero Boitani describes and analyses the undisputed masterpieces of narrative (such as
This revised edition is based on the first edition which has become a classic in Chaucer studies. Important material has been updated in the text, and its contributions cover recent trends in literary
This revised edition is based on the first edition which has become a classic in Chaucer studies. Important material has been updated in the text, and its contributions cover recent trends in literary
