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Danese Cataneo: «felicissimo spirito» in Tasso's documents. The Amor di Marfisa and the Gerusalemme liberata
8-20Views:177Published in 1562, Danese Cataneo’s epic-chivalric poem Amor di Marfisa had a wide but undervalued influence in Torquato Tasso’s masterpiece, Gerusalemme liberata. In this short essay I’ll provide the necessary evidences to demonstrate the existence of a deep connection between those two poems, and establish how it is organized. In particular, Cataneo’s literary legacy, which is underlined by a long list of quote, is strongly perceptible for what concerns the expression of feelings and thoughts. Amor di Marfisa, in this regard, gives to the young Tasso an unusual example of epic poem interested in characters’ psychology: aspects such as the self-analysis and the fragmentation of the ego are underrated in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and all the other Italian poems in ottava rima, whereas they are fundamental in Cataneo’s poem. More than just an example, it represents for Tasso a training ground and a mine, where he founds themes and lexicon that later will be used in Gerusalemme liberata.
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For a dream grammar in the "Decameron". Forms and structures of the oneiric themed novels
96-109Views:311This paper takes into account the oneiric issue in Giovanni Boccaccio Decameron, with the aim of defining Boccaccio’s overall “grammar of dreaming”: besides an accurate investigation on Decameron’s sources, which range from classic to Medieval literature, it retraces the narrative constructions of the short-novels with oneiric subjects, hypothesizing the existence of two main schemes. In the short-tales on a vision (which are the most known), it is almost always replied the scheme of the “tale in the tale”, due to the creation of a imaginary world with its own rules. Meanwhile, in the short tales of deceiving, the dream is useful to trick the naive antagonist, making him believe something unbelievable. In both cases, it has a deep influence on the so-called “statute of reality” (Amedeo Quondam): in the first, there is the invention of a new reality; in the second it is deconstructed instead.