Overview

The textual foundations of works of great cultural significance are often less stable than one would wish them to be. No work of Homer, Dante or Shakespeare survives in utterly reliable witnesses, be they papyri, manuscripts or printed editions. Notions of textual authority have varied considerably across the ages under the influence of different (and differently motivated) agents, such as scribes, annotators, editors, correctors, grammarians, printers and publishers, over and above the authors themselves. The need for preserving the written legacy of peoples and nations as faithfully as possible has always been counterbalanced by a duty to ensure its accessibility to successive generations at different times and in different cultural contexts. The ten chapters collected in this volume offer critical approaches to such authors and texts as Homer, the Bible, The Thousand and One Nights, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Eliot, but also Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts uniquely combining word and image, as well as Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ sonata (Op. 31, No. 2) as seen from the angle of music as text. Together the contributors argue that an awareness of what the ‘life of texts’ entails is essential for a critical understanding of the transmission of culture.

Full Product Details

Author:   Carlo Caruso (Professor of Italian, University of Siena, Italy)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
Weight:   0.381kg
ISBN:  

9781350166011

ISBN 10:   1350166014
Pages:   272
Publication Date:   28 May 2020
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations Foreword List of contributors 1. Conceiving the Life of Texts * Richard Gameson (Durham University, UK) 2. Editing Homer * Barbara Graziosi (Princeton University, USA) 3. The Canon and the Codex: On the Material Form of the Christian Bible * Francis Watson (Durham University, UK) 4. Wandering Nights: Shahrazad's Mutations * Daniel Newman (Durham University, UK) 5. A Text in Exile: Dante's Divine Comedy * Annalisa Cipollone (Durham University, UK) 6. Textual Metamorphosis: The Manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci * Carlo Vecce (Universita degli Studi di Napoli L'Orientale, Italy) 7. Montaigne: The Life and After Life of an Unfinished Text * John O'Brien (Durham University, UK) 8. Rescuing Shakespeare: King Lear and Its Textual Contexts * David Fuller (Durham University, UK) 9. Textual Evidence and Musical Analysis: Once More on the First Movement of Beethoven's 'Tempest' Sonata, Op. 31, No. 2 * Julian Horton (Durham University, UK) 10. Fragments Shored against Ruin: Reassembling The Waste Land * Jason Harding (Durham University, UK) Index of principal passages cited General index

Reviews

An eye-opening book, underlining the importance of thinking long and hard about the life of texts, and forcing us to reflect on their often complex histories so we don't just take the words we read for granted. * Minerva *

Author Information

Carlo Caruso is Professor of Italian Philology at the University of Siena, Italy. For Bloomsbury he has published Adonis: The Myth of the Dying God in the Italian Renaissance (2013), and co-edited with Andrew Laird Italy and the Classical Tradition (2013).

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