{"product_id":"a-local-habitation-and-a-name-imagining-histories-in-the-italian-renaissance-paperback-softback-9780823234295","title":"A Local Habitation and a Name; Imagining Histories in the Italian Renaissance (Paperback \/ softback) 9780823234295","description":"\u003cfont face=\"Georgia\"\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"6\"\u003eA Local Habitation and a Name\u003c\/font\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\r\n\u003cfont size=\"5\"\u003eImagining Histories in the Italian Renaissance\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"4\"\u003eAlbert Russell Ascoli (Author)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e9780823234295, Fordham University Press\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003ePaperback \/ softback, published 1 September 2011\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e384 pages\u003cbr\u003e22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.552 kg\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e. . . A rich feast . . . in which all students of Italian Renaissance literature will find substantial food for thought. (—Renaissance Quarterly) Combining uncommon erudition with a rigorous commitment to critical theory,Albert Ascoli masterfully illuminates the cultural interlacing of power and knowledge—of \"cesare\" and \"poeta\"—in early modern Italy. Whether showing how Petrarch uses his letters to define the place of the man of letters in relation to those in power, examining the literary dimension of Machiavelli's anti-literary treatise, The Prince, or considering the construction of masculinity in Ariosto's Orlando furioso, Ascoli's essays in this elegant collection meditate on the the twin problems of historicizing literature and writing literary history.\u003cb\u003e---—Teodolinda Barolini, \u003ci\u003eColumbia University\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e An important book by an important scholar, this volume should be in collections supporting study of Italian and early modern literature and history. . . Highly Recommended. (—Choice) Ascoli reflects rigorously and consistently on the interdependence\/disjunction between history and literature, on the link between New historicism and New criticism. In his pragmatic sense of the act of reading, he opposes viscerally all abstract theoretical constructions, and he resists, in a steady show of superb analytical writing, all complacent generalized \"solutions\",politically engaged writing, and rigid moralizations, and de facto he reproposes close reading as the abiding model for the future of the profession.\"\u003cb\u003e---—Giuseppe Mazzotta, \u003ci\u003eYale University\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eFocusing on major authors and problems from the Italian fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Machiavelli, Ariosto and Tasso, \u003ci\u003eA Local Habitation and a Name\u003c\/i\u003e examines the unstable dialectic of \"reality\" and \"imagination,\" as well as of \"history\" and \"literature.\" Albert Ascoli identifies and interprets the ways in which literary texts are shaped by and serve the purposes of multiple, intertwined historical discourses and circumstances, and he equally probes the function of such texts in constructing, interpreting, critiquing, and effacing the histories in which they are embedded. Throughout, he poses the theoretical and methodological question of how formal analysis and literary forms can at once resist and further the historicist enterprise.\u003cbr\u003e Along the way Ascoli interrogates the mechanisms of historical periodization that have governed for so long our study of what is sometimes called the \"Renaissance,\" sometimes the early modern period. He also addresses the period's own unstable version of the literature\/history opposition, the place of gendered discourse in the construction of historical narratives (and vice versa), the elaborate formal strategies by which poets and intellectuals negotiate their relations to power, and, finally, the way in which proper names (of authors, works, and exemplary characters) serve as points of negotiation between individual identity and social order in the Renaissance.\u003cbr\u003e The book brings to culmination two decades of a major scholar's thinking about some of the most important figures and questions that shaped the Renaissance, with emphasis on the question of history, both the historical context of literature and the writing of literary history.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003c\/font\u003e","brand":"Fordham University Press","offers":[{"title":"Brand New","offer_id":52580248650008,"sku":"9780823234295","price":30.79,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/freshlyprintedbooks.co.uk\/products\/a-local-habitation-and-a-name-imagining-histories-in-the-italian-renaissance-paperback-softback-9780823234295","provider":"Freshly Printed Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}