Language of Literature in Renaissance Italy

In the course of the Renaissance Italian emerged as a national literary language, which was able to compete with Latin and eventually to supplant it as the normal medium of expression in poetry, prose, and drama. Such a major cultural development was necessarily protracted and complex. In spite of the achievements of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, many issues remained unresolved which exercised Italian writers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. How should classical models and ideals of language and style be assimilated into the vernacular? How far should the linguistic fragmentation of the country affect literature? How was the great literature of the Italian past to furnish models for the present? Italian treatment of such problems at a theoretical and practical level was to have a profound and lasting influence on writers in other European languages. This volume consists of sixteen essays by British and Italian scholars on a wide variety of linguistic and stylistic topics in Italian Renaissance writing.
It includes studies of general trends, of aspects of major writers (Dante, Petrarch, Alberti, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Tasso), and also of lesser-known figures, some of whom illustrate the diverse possibilities open to writers of the time, whilst others concerned themselves with issues of literary history and evaluation. Working from a number of different angles, the essays cast light on a subject whose importance has been increasingly recognized over the last few decades, but which is still to be thoroughly explored. Students of Italian and Renaissance literature and language, first-degree level upwards.