From Boccaccio to the Incogniti: The Cultural Politics of the Italian Tale in English Translation in the Seventeenth Century

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

By the turn of the seventeenth century, the short-form Italian novella in English translation, as a distinct cultural form, was very much on the way out. Yet this near-obsolete genre would resurface sporadically in print regularly in the seventeenth century: in the five editions of Boccaccio’s Decameron published between 1620 and 1684, and, most intriguingly, with the 1652 publication of a translation of contemporary novellas produced by the Venetian libertine Accademia degli Incogniti. Indeed, the Italian novella collection continued to carry much meaning in English literary culture long after its culturally dominant ‘peak’ in the late sixteenth century, but became increasingly used as a discrete, nuanced site of meditation on the perils and pleasures of taboo (erotic; Catholic-derived and Catholic-identifying) cultural transfer. Whereas the 1620 Decameron translation was a sanitized, authorized example of the genre, the later Choice Novels proposes a subversive cultural nostalgia as a strategy of creative resistance.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSeventeenth-Century Fiction: Text and Transmission
EditorsJacqueline Glomski, Isabelle Moreau
Place of PublicationOxford
PublisherOxford University Press
Pages159-182
Number of pages24
ISBN (Print)9780198737261
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 16 Jun 2016

Keywords

  • Accademia degli Incogniti
  • Giovanni Boccaccio
  • libertine
  • translation
  • Venice
  • English Civil War

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