Italian Renaissance Tales

✍ Scribed by Anthony Mortimer

• Book ID: 100547407
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 304 KB
• Series: Oxford world's classics
• Category: Fiction
• City: Oxford
• ISBN: 0192514105

✦ Synopsis

"Italian Renaissance Tales contains thirty-nine stories from nineteen authors, spanning the period roughly from 1370 to 1630 when the short narrative that the Italians call novella became the dominant form of prose fiction. Originating in Florence in the fourteenth century, it spread throughout Italy and by the sixteenth century collections of novella were hugely popular and influential in Spain, France, and England. In the 250 years during which this eclectic genre flourished, its subject matter expanded to embrace the courtly love story, the fable, the parable, the comic anecdote, and the exotic tale. The most famous example and acknowledged model of the genre is Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron which featured 100 tales told by ten narrators. The Italian Renaissance novella provided important source texts for Chaucer (The Clerk's Tale of Patient Griselda), Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, Othello, The Merchant of Venice), and Webster (The Duchess of Malfi), as well as early and unexpectedly violent versions of folk tales such as Cinderella and The Sleeping Beauty."