Social identity and literary genres. Birth and Death of the Stil Nuovo’s sodality
Main Article Content
Abstract
The article considers the literary production of Dante Alighieri – and, in parallel, of his “first friend” Guido Cavalcanti – between the composition of the Vita nuova and Dante’s exile. It aims to show that the conflict between Dante and Cavalcanti can also be situated on the level of the representation that the two poets give of themselves in their work, through their chosen poetics and literary genres. Despite having the reputation of a philosophus, the magnate Guido shows his aristocratic disdain even in literary options: he depicts himself as a knight-poet and focuses solely on the representation and analysis of the phenomenology of love. On the contrary, from the Vita nuova on, Dante does not present himself to his audience as only an exquisite and aristocratic love poet, but also – and explicitly – as an expert in physiology, philosophy, and rhetoric. On the model of Guittone d’Arezzo and Brunetto Latini, when he enters Florentine political life, he attributes a civic and ethical function to his poetry, which definitively breaks with the “stilnovistic” poetics of his juvenile association with Cavalcanti.
Downloads
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
RM Journal is an open access, online publication, with licence:
| CCPL Creative Commons Attribution |
The author retains the copyright of his work whilst granting anyone the possibility “to reproduce, distribute, publicly communicate, publicly exhibit, display, perform and recite the work”, provided that the author and the title of the journal are cited correctly. When submitting the text for publication the author is furthermore required to declare that the contents and the structure of the work are original and that it does not by any means compromise the rights of third parties nor the obligations connected to the safeguard of the moral and economic rights of other authors or other right holders, both for texts, images, photographs, tables, as well as for other parts which compose the contribution. The author furthermore declares that he/she is conscious of the sanctions prescribed by the penal code and by the Italian Criminal and Special Laws for false documents and the use false documents, and that therefore Reti Medievali is not liable to responsibilities of any nature, civil, administrative or penal, and that the author agrees to indemnify and hold Reti Medievali harmless from all requests and claims by third parties.