Piero Boitani

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 the works of the Gawain poet, Langland, Gower and Chaucer), as well as the anonymous romances and specimens of religious and comic narrative which form the background to the better-known poems. The book is divided by literary genres or structural systems: chapters on the religious, comic and romance traditions are followed by a discussion of dream and visionary narratives and a chapter on story collections including those of Gower. The rest of the book is devoted to Chaucer, who mastered all these types.

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, tragic studies 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.

Astronomy described in art and architecture, literature and poetry, etc.

Piero Boitani's study is a perceptive and imaginative exploration of the myth of Ulysses in a range of western literature from Homer to Joyce. 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. Among the writers discussed in this book are Homer and Dante, Tasso and Tennyson, Leopardi, Poe, and Baudelaire, as well as Conrad, Levi, Joyce, and Borges. Informed by modern critical theory, Piero Boitani's elegant work displays deep learning as well as illuminating and enlivening readings of a wide range of references as it describes the incarnations of Ulysses.

"Anagnorisis has been called 'one of the great works of comparative literary criticism of our time' is a book that spans the millennia, the adventures of Ulysses in Homer and God's mysterious appearance to Abraham in Genesis, down not only to Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Mann's Joseph and his Brothers, but also to Borges's 'The Immortal' and Derek Walcott Omeros. 'Anagnorisis' means 'recognition'. Aristotle defined it simply as 'the passage from ignorance to knowledge'. But the knowledge one gains in anagnorisis is neither scientific nor abstract - it is living knowledge in the flesh, as Euripides' Helen understood when, seeing her husband again after many years, she exclaimed: 'to recognize those we love is a god"--

Publisher description: In Winged Words Laura Coltelli interviews some of America's foremost Indian poets and novelists, including Paula Gunn Allen, Michael Dorris, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz, Wendy Rose, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor; and James Welch. They candidly discuss the debt to old and the creation of new traditions, the proprieties of age and gender; and the relations between Indian writers and non-Indian readers and critics, and between writers and anthropologists and histo-rians. In exploring a wide range of topics, each writer arrives at his or her own moment of truth.

"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 that Shakespeare read the New Testament with great care and an overall sense of affirmation and participation, and that many of his plays constitute their own original testament, insofar as they translate the good news into human terms. In Hamlet and King Lear, he suggests, Shakespeare's "New Testament" is merely hinted at, and faith, salvation, and peace are only glimpsed from far away. But in Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, the themes of compassion and forgiveness, transcendence, immanence, the role of the deity, resurrection, and epiphany are openly, if often obliquely, staged. The Christian Gospels and the Christian Bible are the signposts of this itinerary. Originally published in 2009, Boitani's Il Vangelo Secondo Shakespeare was awarded the 2010 De Sanctis Prize, a prestigious Italian literary award. Now available for the first time in an English translation, The Gospel according to Shakespeare brings to a broad scholarly and nonscholarly audience Boitani's insights into the current themes dominating the study of Shakespeare's literary theology. It will be of special interest to general readers interested in Shakespeare's originality and religious perspective."--Publisher's description.

The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer is an extensively revised version of the first edition, which has become a classic in the field. This new volume responds to the success of the first edition and to recent debates in Chaucer Studies. Important material has been updated, and new contributions have been commissioned to take into account recent trends in literary theory as well as in studies of Chaucer's works. New chapters cover the literary inheritance traceable in his works to French and Italian sources, his style, as well as new approaches to his work. Other topics covered include the social and literary scene in England in Chaucer's time, and comedy, pathos and romance in the Canterbury Tales. The volume now offers a useful chronology, and the bibliography has been entirely updated to provide an indispensable guide for today's student of Chaucer.

More than two thousand years after it was written, Plato’s Timaeus continues to fascinate and intrigue its readers. In Timaeus in Paradise, Piero Boitani traces the abiding legacy of the Timaeus, mapping an intellectual journey that begins with Plato and extends to Dante and beyond. In a series of short, lyrical chapters, Boitani sketches a lineage that includes Proclus, Boethius, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, John Scotus Eriugena and Thomas Aquinas. Focusing on Plato’s metaphorical language—which Dante considered comparable to that of the Bible—and the beauty of its images, Boitani shows that these images penetrate deep into European culture, inspiring the anonymous author of the treatise on the Sublime as well as the mystical writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Plato’s account of the creation of the cosmos in the Timaeus supplants Hesiod’s myths and Parmenides’s theories—and was described by Johannes Kepler as the best gloss ever on the first chapter of Genesis. Boitani finds its echoes everywhere, from the sculptures of Chartres Cathedral and the frescoes of the Anagni Crypt to the paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo. He connects the beauty defined in the Timaeus to the beauties of the Hebrew Bible and to the lilies of the field invoked by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Bringing together philosophy, theology, mysticism, poetry, sculpture and painting, Boitani charts Europe’s intellectual history—a history of ideas and images—by capturing the enduring reverberations of Plato’s summa. Illustrations accompanying the text cover more than two thousand years of iconography.