The Italian Lyric Tradition from Petrarch to Marino

Catalog description

This course offers an overview of the development of lyric poetry in Italy from the fourteenth to the early seventeenth century, beginning with Petrarch’s refashioning of lyric style in his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, and ending with the emergence of the Baroque as a literary movement. Stylistic developments over this period will be related to the differing historical contexts of production and consumption of lyric poetry, with a major thematic focus being the impact of print culture on the sixteenth-century lyric tradition, and another the influence on this tradition of the great religious reform movements of the sixteenth century. Other issues explored in the course are the gendering of the lyric voice in amatory and religious lyric; the emergence of the figure of the female poet in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the relationship between lyric poetry and social history; and the relationship between lyric poetry and the visual arts. The aim of the course is provide a secure grasp of the history of lyric poetry in this period as conventionally told and an acquaintance with its canonical authors (Petrarch, Bembo, Della Casa, Tasso, Marino), while, at the same time, allowing for exploration within new areas of research that have opened up especially in the past decade or so, notably the history of women’s engagement with lyric as readers and writers, and the development of religious lyric through the Counter- Reformation and into the Baroque.