Casanova Beyond Ambiguity

Renaissance Irony as Textual Practice in Sixteenth-Century Italian and French Literature
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-5015-2407-3
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 42, 356 Seiten

Reihe: Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

This study reframes irony as a rhetorical practice situated at the intersection of ethics and rhetoric in sixteenth-century French and Italian literature. While foundational studies by Norman Knox and Dilwyn Knox trace the diachronic or lexical evolution of irony, they do not examine its practical function within literary texts or its ethical and epistemological dimensions. This book responds to this gap by offering a critical account of irony’s rhetorical agency across a corpus including Erasmus, Ariosto, Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais, and Montaigne. It argues that irony in the Renaissance is not merely a stylistic figure but a mode of inquiry that transforms classical and medieval traditions. Through close readings, the study explores how irony reconfigures genre, authorship, and moral discourse, showing that its elusiveness demands contextual, practical analysis rather than fixed definition. It argues that Renaissance irony shifts from being a tool subject to ontological investigation (is irony a lie or a truth?) to becoming a gnoseological instrument of inquiry. The dichotomy between true and false, which underpinned medieval discourse on rhetoric, is overridden as irony shifts from being an object of study to an instrument that investigates the limits and functions of language, as well as the forms of the texts to which language must rigorously conform.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Casanova, Elena

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Romanische Literaturen Französische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Romanische Literaturen Italienische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik

Über Autor(innen)

Elena Casanova earned her PhD in French and Comparative Literature from LMU Munich in 2025 with a thesis on Renaissance irony. She was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley in 2019 and 2020.