Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Introduction Reading Against the Grain: Musings of an Italianist, from the Astral to the Artisanal 1
4. I. A PHILOSOPHY OF DESIRE
5. 1. Dante and the Lyric Past 23
6. 2. Guittone’s Ora parrà, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire 47
7. 3. Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyric and Autobiographical Context 70
8. 4. Medieval Multiculturalism and Dante’s Theology of Hell 102
9. II. CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN INTERTEXTS
10. 5. Why Did Dante Write the Commedia? Dante and the Visionary Tradition 125
11. 6. Minos’s Tail: The Labor of Devising Hell (Aeneid 6.431–33 and Inferno 5.1–24) 132
12. 7. Q: Does Dante Hope for Vergil’s Salvation? A: Why Do We Care? For the Very Reason We Should Not Ask the Question 151
13. 8. Arachne, Argus, and St. John: Transgressive Art in Dante and Ovid 158
14. III. ORDERING THE MACROTEXT: TIME AND NARRATIVE
15. 9. Cominciandomi dal principio infino a la fine: Forging Anti-narrative in the Vita nuova 175
16. 10. The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 193
17. 11. The Wheel of the Decameron 224
18. 12. Editing Dante’s Rime and Italian Cultural History: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca . . . Barbi, Contini, Foster-Boyde, De Robertis 245
19. IV. GENDER
20. 13. Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron (Decameron 2.9, 2.10, 5.10) 281
21. 14. Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, and Gender 304
22. 15. Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo (With a Brief Excursus on Cecco d’Ascoli) 333
23. 16. Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrix Loquax 360
24. Notes 379
25. Index 467