Overview

Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante provides a new perspective on the highly networked literary landscape of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy. It demonstrates the fundamental role of dialogue between and within texts in the works of four poets who represent some of the major developments in early Italian literature: Guittone d'Arezzo, Guido Guinizzelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante. Rather than reading the cultural landscape through the lens of Dante's works, significant though they may be, the first part of this study reconstructs the rich network of literary, especially poetic dialogue that was at the heart of medieval writing in Italy. The second part uses this reconstruction to demonstrate Dante's engagement with, and indebtedness to, the dynamics of exchange that characterised the practice of medieval Italian poets. The overall argument--for the centrality of dialogic processes to the emerging Italian literary tradition--is underpinned by a conceptualisation of dialogue in relation to medieval and modern literary theory and philosophy of language. By triangulating between Brunetto Latini's Rettorica, Mikhail Bakhtin's 'dialogism', and as sense of 'performative' speech adapted from J. L. Austin, Poetry in Dialogue shows the openness of its corpus to new dialogues and interpretations, highlighting the instabilities of even the most apparently fixed, monumental texts.

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9780198849575

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With this monograph Bowe has made a valuable contribution to scholarship on the poetry of the Duecento. He demonstrates the subtleties in the poets' interactions with one another and with their own poetic corpora. * Fabian Alfie, Modern Language Review * Dante's poetics and his relationships with literary precursors are thematised throughout the Commedia. Bowe maintains that even when Dante lavishes praise on another poet, it is always with ulterior motives, correcting and surpassing his model. * Barbara Newman, London Review of Books *

Dante's poetics and his relationships with literary precursors are thematised throughout the Commedia. Bowe maintains that even when Dante lavishes praise on another poet, it is always with ulterior motives, correcting and surpassing his model. * Barbara Newman, London Review of Books *

Author Information

David Bowe works on medieval Italian culture and its reception, with a particular focus on Dante, the lyric tradition, dialogue, gender, and voice. He completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2014 with a thesis on dialogic modes of self-representation in medieval Italian verse. While studying at Oxford he was awarded the Senior Paget Toynbee Prize for essays in Dante Studies. He was a visiting fellow at the Leeds Humanities Research Institute in 2014, Victoria Maltby Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford from 2015 to 2018, and retained lecturer in Italian at Pembroke College Oxford from 2017 to 2018. In 2018, he was awarded an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at University College Cork.

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