Piero Boitani

Professor of Comparative Literature Piero Boitani

Anna Torti

The theme of the `body and soul' relationship in medieval texts and modern reworkings. The theme of the body-and-soul relationship in medieval texts and in modern reworkings of medieval matter is explored in the articles here, specifically the representation of the body in romance; the relevance of bawdy tales to the cultural experience of authors and readers in the middle ages; the function of despair, or melancholy, in medieval and Renaissance literature; and the political significance of late medieval representations of `bodies' in the chroniclers' accounts of the Rising and in Gower's poems. Two articles are devoted to modern retellings of medieval themes: John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, seen in relation to the traditional acta martyrum, and the medieval revival in Tory Britain exemplified in Douglas Oliver's The Infant and the Pearl. Contributors: PAMELA JOSEPH BENSON, NIGEL S. THOMPSON, JON WHITMAN, JEROME MANDEL, BARBARA NOLAN, YASUNARI TAKADA, YVETTE MARCHAND, ROBERT F. YEAGER, JOERG O. FICHTE, JOHN KERRIGAN

The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature

Flight has always fascinated human minds, but until a century ago it remained a dream - the exclusive domain of birds, gods, and mythological heroes. From the myths of the ancients to the poetry of Pindar and Yeats, Winged Words traces the imprint of the human impulse to fly from premodern times to the age of terrorism in both literature and his...

Flight in Poetry and History

Winged Words

ero Boitani

Simultaneously ancient and modern, the figure of Ulysses is an ideal observation-point from which to measure the similarities and differences between the otherness ('alterity') of the past and the 'modernity' of the present. Boitani sees Ulysses as a figure which every culture is free to interpret, according him values rooted on the one hand in the mythical qualities of Odysseus as a character, and on the other in the ideals, problems, and philosophical, ethical, and political horizons of the individual civilization. The Shadow of Ulysses follows the evolution of the sign through the ages, returning continuously as it does so to problems of intertextuality, interpretation, and reading. The sign appears as a 'shadow' both because by means of it, poetry describes humanity's journey to the other world of death, and because, in a figural connotation, Ulysses 'foreshadows' Columbus's and Vespucci's historical voyages to the New World.

Professor of Comparative Literature Piero Boitani

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