'Anticlassicisms,' as a plural, react to the many possible forms of 'classicisms.' In the sixteenth century, classicist tendencies range from humanist traditions focusing on Horace and the teachings of rhetoric, via Pietro Bembo's canonization of a 'second antiquity' in the works of the fourteenth-century classics, Petrarch and Boccaccio, to the Aristotelianism of the second half of the century. Correspondingly, the various tendencies to destabilize or to subvert or contradict these manifold and historically dynamic 'classicisms' need to be distinguished as so many 'anticlassicisms'. This volume, after discussing the history and possible implications of the label 'anticlassicism' in Renaissance studies, differentiates and analyzes these 'anticlassicisms.' It distinguishes the various forms of opposition to 'classicisms' as to their scope (on a scale between radical poetological dissension to merely sectorial opposition in a given literary genre) and to their alternative models, be they authors (like Dante) or texts. At the same time, the various chapters specify the degree of difference or erosion inherent in anticlassicist tendencies with respect to their 'classicist' counterparts, ranging from implicit 'system disturbances' to open, intended antagonism (as in Bernesque poetry), with a view to establishing an overall picture of this field of phenomena for the first time.

This volume deals with different attempts undertaken during the Italian Renaissance to define the nature of the lyrical and of individual lyrical forms (including sonnets, epigrams, canzone, ballads, madrigals, and elegies). It begins with an introductory outline of the fundamental dilemma of the era, when an attempt was made to transform the diverse traditions of lyrical writing and the various theoretical options in the literary theory of the cinquecento into a coherent system of poetics. Subsequently, the first main chapter details the different systematic approaches, influenced predominantly by a reading of Aristotelian poetics, attempted by G.G. Trissino, I.C. Scaliger, A.S. Minturno, P. Torellis, and T. Tasso. The second main chapter provides an extensive analysis of contemporary theories about the specific lyrical forms listed above. Overall, this study reveals that lyrical theory in the cinquecento remained a precarious territory: a unitary theory of poetics does not emerge, but instead, we must accept a plurality of possible proposals for a lyrical theory."