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 language | English |
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Title of host publication | Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text and Transmission |
Editors | Jacqueline Glomski, Isabelle Moreau |
Place of Publication | Oxford |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 159-182 |
Number of pages | 24 |
ISBN (Print) | 9780198737261 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 16 Jun 2016 |
Keywords
- Accademia degli Incogniti
- Giovanni Boccaccio
- libertine
- translation
- Venice
- English Civil War