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The Absence of Grace - Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Paperback)
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The Absence of Grace - Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Paperback)
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"The Absence of Grace" is a study of male fantasy, representation
anxiety, and narratorial authority in two sixteenth-century books,
Baldassare Castiglione's "Il libro del Cortegiano" (1528) and
Giovanni Della Casa's "Galateo" (1558). The interpretive method is
a form of close reading the author describes as reconstructed old
New Criticism, that is, close reading conditioned by an interest in
and analysis of the historical changes reflected in the text. The
book focuses on the way the "Courtier" and "Galateo" cope with and
represent the interaction between changes of elite culture and the
changing construction of masculine identity in early modern Europe.
More specifically, it connects questions of male fantasy and
masculine identity to questions about the authority and reliability
of narrators, and shows how these questions surface in narratorial
attitudes toward socioeconomic rank or class, political power, and
gender.
The book is in three parts. Part One examines a distinction and
correlation the "Courtier" establishes between two key terms, (1)
"sprezzatura, " defined as a behavioral skill intended to simulate
the attributes of (2) "grazia, " understood as the grace and
privileges of noble birth. Because "sprezzatura" is negatively
conceptualized as the absence of grace it generates anxiety and
suspicion in performers and observers alike. In order to suggest
how the binary opposition between these terms affected the
discourse of manners, the author singles out the titular episode of
"Galateo, " an anecdote about table manners, which he reads closely
and then sets in its historical perspective. Part Two takes up the
question of "sprezzatura" in the gender debate that develops in
Book 3 of the "Courtier, " and Part Three explores in detail the
characterization of the two narrators in the "Courtier" and
"Galateo, " who are represented as unreliable and an object of
parody or critique.
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