Bringing together twenty-five contributors from all over Europe, this volume represents the vitality and diversity of the current transcultural European dialogue on English studies. Topics addressed include: * the nature of the canon * the poetics of language * the representation of women and the notion of nationalism in post-colonial literature. The significance of this volume lies not only in the quality of the individual contributions but also in the fact that it marks an important turning point in the history of English studies in Europe.

This revised edition is based on the first edition which has become a classic in Chaucer studies. Important material has been updated in the text, and its contributions cover recent trends in literary theory as well as in studies of Chaucer's works. The bibliography has been completely revised to provide an indispensable guide for today's student of Chaucer. First Edition Hb (1986): 0-521-30422-9 First Edition Pb (1986): 0-521-31689-8

"English Studies in Transition" collects the papers offered at the Inaugural Conference of the European Society for the Study of English, held at the University of East Anglia in September 1991. Topics addressed include the nature of the canon, the poetics of language, the representation of women and the notion of nationalism in postcolonial literature.
Among those who have contributed papers are: Sir Frank Kermode, Alan Sinfield, Jean-jacques Lecercle, Jina Politi, Pilar Hidlago and Elleke Boehmer. This volume marks a turning point in the history of English studies in Europe.

Members of the Florentine family of the Donati feature prominently in Dante's Divine Comedy . Their presence is explored by Piero Boitani, as a 'comedy' within the Comedy, in close readings of the three major episodes in which they appear, one for each of Inferno , Purgatorio , and Paradiso .

lThe House/of/Fame/l> is one of Chaucer's most intellectually challenging poems, drawing on diverse traditions such as dream poetry and mythology, but unified by the central concept of Fame. It is this concept, and the imaginary world' which surrounds it, which Professor Boitani explores in this volume in the Chaucer Studies series. He begins with a brief outline and discussion of the poem, showing what problems it poses, and then turns to explore the history and meaning of the idea of Fame, such as Chaucer might have received from tradition', a quest which leads him into Biblical, classical and Anglo-Saxon literature, into philosophy and into romance. He then examines the view of Fame in Chaucer's Italian, French and English contemporaries, and shows that it is a central theme not only in Dante's l>Divine Comedy/l> but also in the work of Boccaccio and Petrarch. The second half of the book returns to Chaucer's poem and examines the imaginary world which he constructs around Fame. Professor Boitani demonstrates that l>The House of Fame/l> is in a sense Chaucer's creative manifesto, centred on Fame as the goddess of language, myth and poetry, with poets as her prophets. In this poem, he defines many of the themes - Love and Nature, order and disorder, fortune and chance, reality and appearance - which occupied him in his other works. Here he deals with them directly rather than obliquely, revealing the formative influences behind his own imaginary world and mythology..

"[It] will move you across the globe and back in time." - Library Journal Europa Compass series - new format and covers For the readers of Mary Beard and Bethany Hughes (Re)discover the timeless beauty of ancient literature The classics "never exhaust what they have to say". Informed by this belief, linguistic expert Piero Boitani invites the reader to explore the wisdom of the works of literature underpinning Western culture, and highlights their profound and sometimes surprising connection to the present. The themes explored in this book are as wide-ranging as they are enduringly relevant. They include the Iliad's depiction of power and war, as well as its invocation of compassion as one of the necessary foundations of society; the Odyssey as the world's first novel; Lucretius and the way he transformed Greek scientific thought into sublime poetry; Virgil's celebration of the history of Rome, from small village to world capital, as well as Tacitus' denunciation of the imperialistic nature of Roman power; and Ovid's Metamorphoses-a poem about incessant change the first postmodern classic.

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, studies tragic 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.

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.

This paperback consists of a collection of essays which have aroused considerable interest, since their first publication in 1983, in a question that has been occupying scholars for many years: what did fourteenth-century Italy and its literature mean to Chaucer? In the first part of the book contributors assess the general state of English and Italian culture in the fourteenth century and the complex network of Anglo-Italian relationships in the areas of trade, finance, church organisation and academic exchange. The second part faces the literary problem that Chaucer's borrowing from Italian authors poses: not only what he takes, but how and why. These essays include source studies and comparative analyses of such masterpieces as The Divine Comedy, The Canzoniere, The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales.

This revised edition is based on the first edition which has become a classic in Chaucer studies. Important material has been updated in the text, and its contributions cover recent trends in literary theory as well as in studies of Chaucer's works. The bibliography has been completely revised to provide an indispensable guide for today's student of Chaucer. First Edition Hb (1986): 0-521-30422-9 First Edition Pb (1986): 0-521-31689-8

The Genius to Improve an Invention derives its title from John Dryden's phrase for the British tendency to take up literary masterpieces from the past and "perfect" them. Distinguished literary scholar Piero Boitani adopts Dryden's notion as a framework for exploring ways in which classical and medieval texts, scenes, and themes have been rewritten by modern authors.

Boitani focuses on a concept of literary transition that takes into account both T. S. Eliot's idea of "tradition and individual talent" and Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence." In five elegant essays he examines a wide range of authors and texts, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Voltaire, Goethe, Sartre, Dante, and Keats. Appearing for the first time in an English translation, The Genius to Improve an Invention will appeal to anyone interested in the Western literary tradition.

The Bible and its Rewritings examines some of the most beautiful and intriguing scenes from the Old and New Testament such as the encounter between Abraham and God, and Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The author also investigates the direct or indirect Re-Scriptures of these by writers like Thomas Mann, Chaucer, Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, Tournier, Joseph Roth, as well as by ancient exegesis, catacomb frescoes, and church paintings.

This book, the first to be devoted to the story of Troilus and Cressida as it develops through the ages and in various literatures, is the joint effort of an international team of scholars. It studies a myth which represents an important aspect of the European imagination: the way in which the problems of love and death are faced in narrative, poetry, drama, and opera. From the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans the story passes into the hands of artists such as Benoit de Sainte Maure, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Henryson, Shakespeare, and Dryden, and is finally resurrected in the twentieth century in America, England, and Germany. This book analyses the changes - both literary and more broadly imaginative - that minor and major writers have introduced, and thus constitutes the product of a truly intertextual and comparative approach. While devoting attention to all these authors and their works, the volume concentrates on the treatment of the theme in Chaucer and Shakespeare and is therefore aimed at students of English and Comparative Literature as well as those general readers who are interested in the history of European culture. Contributors:Piero Boitani, University of Rome, Malcolm Andrew, Queen's University, Belfast, C. David Benson, University of Connecticut, Jill Mann, University of Cambridge, Karl Reichl, University of Bonn, Anna Torti, University of Verona, Barry Windeatt, University of Cambridge, Sergio Rufini, University of Perugia, Giulia Natali, University of Rome, Agostino Lombardo, University of Rome, Roberto Antonelli, University of Rome, Derek Brewer, University of Cambridge

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

This book recounts the exciting tale of human beings relationship with the stars. It covers that tale from prehistory and antiquity to the Middle Ages, going as far as the year 1400 CE, the year of Geoffrey Chaucers death in England. This volume is not an astronomy textbook, nor a history of astronomy. It is a book that intends to explore, or present, the image of the stars that, throughout history, humanity constructed for itself: the image, that is, as it was transmitted through literature, the visual arts, and music. In doing so, it was of course impossible to avoid those frequent and fruitful moments when the arts encountered science, philosophy, and religion. Looking Upwards is the result of this constant historical interweaving. The lodestar for this book was the search for cosmic poetry, for beauty, and for the sublime for the enthusiasm and the terror that writers, painters, and composers of all ages and continents have directed towards the stars. From the dawn of human civilisation to the end of the fourteenth century, Looking Upwards traces the human passion for the cosmos in chronological order and West to East geographic movement from Paleolithic caves to Egyptian pyramids, in Ur of the Chaldees (from where Abraham came), in classical Greece and Rome, from medieval Europe to Persia, India, China and Japan. Domes of Heaven in Constantinople and Ravenna, in Jerusalem and Granada, star vaults and mosaics, frescoes and stone engravings appear all over the planet. The music of the spheres resonates from Pythagoras to Shakespeare, from the songs of Native Americans to those of the Australian Aborigines. Homers poetry influences Virgil, Boethius inspires Dante, the Bible and Arabic literature are reflected in the work of Shelomoh Ibn Gabirol, Omar Khayyam and Hafez find a new life in Edward Fitzgerald and Goethe, the Ramayana reverberates in Kalidasa, and Du Fu finds companionship in Japanese haikus. Looking Upwards is a book of world literature, because people all over the world can sing, with the Abenaki of North America: We Are the Stars Who Sing.

The World Machine is the second volume Piero Boitani devotes to the way in which the sciences and the arts interact when it comes to modern consideration of the stars and the cosmos (the first, also published in English by Nova Science Publishers, is entitled Looking Upwards: Stars in Ancient and Medieval Cultures). This is not a history of astronomy or astrophysics, but the story arranged in chronological order of how humans have reacted to fundamental changes in astronomy by means of poetry, narrative, painting, architecture, and music over the last five hundred years. This time, the story is basically European (and American), as all the relevant scientific discoveries were made in Europe, and it is the European imaginaire that dominates world culture (non-European images of the universe are dealt with in Looking Upwards). The historical development of this image and of the ideas that contribute to its formation is rather complex and diversified, but two major turning points are clearly identifiable one lies between the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and one at the very beginning of the twentieth century. Concerning the former, the observation of the sky was revolutionized by the telescope. Galileo, Kepler and Newton could thus base their new models of the universe on much more precise experiences, and mathematics became the new language of astronomy. The cosmos increasingly tended to be viewed as a machine, a mechanism like a clock (hence the books title). Between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century the second scientific revolution took place. The instruments became so refined that they began to detect increasingly remote objects, and the phenomena found in the sky, as well as their behavior, no longer fully responded to Newtonian laws. New theories relativity and quantum mechanics were elaborated, the mathematics needed for them becoming much more difficult for the layman, and the whole structure of matter, with the discovery of the atom, its constituent parts, and its particles was gradually uncovered. Things reached a critical moment with Heisenbergs and Hubbles formulation of, respectively, the uncertainty principle and of the increasing speed at which galaxies recede from us the further they are and finally with the conflict between relativity and quantum theories. Some recent poets (notably in South America) and many painters and musicians in Europe and North America have tried to describe this new cosmos, but the same happened after the first scientific revolution. In short, The Machine of the World recounts an exciting adventure whose protagonists are the likes of Tasso and Milton, Goethe and Wallace Stevens, Canaletto and Friedrich, Verdi and Puccini, Van Gogh and Schoenberg, Joyce and Thomas Mann.

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.

The Genius to Improve an Invention derives its title from John Dryden's phrase for the British tendency to take up literary masterpieces from the past and "perfect" them. Distinguished literary scholar Piero Boitani adopts Dryden's notion as a framework for exploring ways in which classical and medieval texts, scenes, and themes have been rewritten by modern authors.

Boitani focuses on a concept of literary transition that takes into account both T. S. Eliot's idea of "tradition and individual talent" and Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence." In five elegant essays he examines a wide range of authors and texts, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Voltaire, Goethe, Sartre, Dante, and Keats. Appearing for the first time in an English translation, The Genius to Improve an Invention will appeal to anyone interested in the Western literary tradition.

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, studies tragic 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.