The Renaissance Dialogue
Literary Dialogue in its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo

A study of the use of dialogue form as a vehicle for polemic in Renaissance Italy.

Virginia Cox (Author)

9780521069663, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 31 July 2008

252 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.37 kg

Review of the hardback: 'This book is of enormous value to Renaissance literary and social historians.' The Times Higher Education Supplement

This is a full-length study of the use of the dialogue form in Italy from the early sixteenth century until Galileo. Drawing on a wide range of sources, it examines the characteristics which determined the genre's unrivalled popularity in the period as a vehicle for polemic, debate, technical exposition and comic drama. More than simply an account of the development of an individual literary genre, however, the book is a contribution to the broader social and cultural history of the period. As representations of conversation, miniature dramas of persuasion, the dialogues of the Italian Renaissance constitute an extraordinarily rich - and largely untapped - source of information about the ideals and practice of communication in the early modern age.

1. Problems of method
2. History and invention in the dialogue
3. The uses of the dialogue in sixteenth-century Italy: celebration and control
4. The use of dialogue in sixteenth-century Italy: commerce and courtesy
5. Castiglione's Cortegiano: the dialogue as a drama of doubt
6. The changing form of the Italian renaissance dialogue
7. The theory and practice of the dialogue in counter-Reformation Italy
8. From the 'girevole strada' to the straight and narrow path
9. From the open dialogue to the closed book.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]