Self-Commentary in Early Modern European Literature, 1400-1700

Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-90-04-34686-4
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 62, 434 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 1021 g

Reihe: Intersections

This volume investigates the various ways in which writers comment on, present, and defend their own works, and at the same time themselves, across early modern Europe. A multiplicity of self-commenting modes, ranging from annotations to explicatory prose to prefaces to separate critical texts and exemplifying a variety of literary genres, are subjected to analysis. Self-commentaries are more than just an external apparatus: they direct and control reception of the primary text, thus affecting notions of authorship and readership. With the writer understood as a potentially very influential and often tendentious interpreter of their own work, the essays in this collection offer new perspectives on pre-modern and modern forms of critical self-consciousness, self-representation, and self-validation.

Contributors are Harriet Archer, Gilles Bertheau, Carlo Caruso, Jeroen De Keyser, Russell Ganim, Joseph Harris, Ian Johnson, Richard Maber, Martin McLaughlin, John O’Brien, Magdalena Ozarska, Federica Pich, Brian Richardson, Els Stronks, and Colin Thompson.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Venturi, Francesco

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Notes on the Editor

Notes on the Contributors

Introduction

Francesco Venturi

1 Alberti’s Commentarium to His First Literary Work: Self-Commentary as Self-Presentation in the Philodoxeos

Martin McLaughlin

2 Elucidation and Self-Explanation in Filelfo’s Marginalia

Jeroen De Keyser

3 Vernacular Self-Commentary during Medieval Early Modernity: Reginald Pecock and Gavin Douglas

Ian Johnson

4 On the Threshold of Poems: a Paratextual Approach to the Narrative/Lyric Opposition in Italian Renaissance Poetry

Federica Pich

5 Self-Commentary on Language in Sixteenth-Century Italian Prefatory Letters

Brian Richardson

6 ‘All Outward and on Show’: Montaigne’s External Glosses

John O’Brien

7 Companions in Folly: Genre and Poetic Practice in Five Elizabethan Anthologies

Harriet Archer

8 The Journey of the Soul: The Prose Commentaries on His Own Poems by St John of the Cross

Colin P. Thompson

9 Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Annotation and Self-Exegesis in La Ceppède

Russell Ganim

10 Can a Poet be ‘Master of [his] owne Meaning’? George Chapman and the Paradoxes of Authorship

Gilles Bertheau

11 Critical Failures: Corneille Observes His Spectators

Joseph Harris

12 Self-Criticism, Self-Assessment, and Self-Affirmation: The Case of the (Young) Author in Early Modern Dutch Literature

Els Stronks

13 Reading the Margins: The Uses of Authorial Side Glosses in Anna Stanislawska’s Transaction (1685)

Magdalena Ozarska

14 Mockery and Erudition: Alessandro Tassoni’s Secchia rapita and Francesco Redi’s Bacco in Toscana

Carlo Caruso

Afterword

Richard Maber

Index Nominum

Über Autor(innen)

Francesco Venturi, PhD (2012, University of Siena), is Associate Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Oslo. He has published widely in the field of early modern and twentieth-century literature and culture, including the monograph Genesi e storia della ‘trilogia’ di Andrea Zanzotto (ETS, 2016).