Martin Eisner – författare

Dante's Vita nuova has taken on a wide variety of different forms since its first publication in 1294. How could one work have generated such different physical forms? Through examining the work's transformations in manuscripts, printed books, translations, and adaptations, Eisner reconceives of the relationship between the work and its reception. Dante's New Life of the Book investigates how these different material manifestations participate in the work, drawing attention to its distinctive elements. Dante framed his book as an attempt to understand his own experiences through the experimental form of the book, and later scribes, editors, and translators use different material forms to embody their interpretations of Dante's collection of thirty-one poems surrounded by prose narrative and commentary. Traveling from Boccaccio's Florence to contemporary Hollywood with stops in Emerson's Cambridge, Rossetti's London, Nerval's Paris, Mandelstam's Russia, De Campos's Brazil, and Pamuk's Istanbul, this study builds on extensive archival research to show how Dante's strange poetic forms, including incomplete canzoni and sonnets with two beginnings, continue to challenge readers. Each chapter focuses on how one of these distinctive features has been treated over time, offering new perspectives on topics such as Dante's love of Beatrice, his relationship with Guido Cavalcanti, and his attraction to another woman. Numerous illustrations show the entanglement of the work's poetic form and its material survival. Eisner provides a fresh reading of Dante's innovations, demonstrating the value of this philological analysis of the work's survival in the world.

Dante's Vita nuova has taken on a wide variety of different forms since its first publication in 1294. How could one work have generated such different physical forms? Through examining the work's transformations in manuscripts, printed books, translations, and adaptations, Eisner reconceives of the relationship between the work and its reception. Dante's New Life of the Book investigates how these different material manifestations participate in the work, drawing attention to its distinctive elements. Dante framed his book as an attempt to understand his own experiences through the experimental form of the book, and later scribes, editors, and translators use different material forms to embody their interpretations of Dante's collection of thirty-one poems surrounded by prose narrative and commentary. Traveling from Boccaccio's Florence to contemporary Hollywood with stops in Emerson's Cambridge, Rossetti's London, Nerval's Paris, Mandelstam's Russia, De Campos's Brazil, and Pamuk's Istanbul, this study builds on extensive archival research to show how Dante's strange poetic forms, including incomplete canzoni and sonnets with two beginnings, continue to challenge readers. Each chapter focuses on how one of these distinctive features has been treated over time, offering new perspectives on topics such as Dante's love of Beatrice, his relationship with Guido Cavalcanti, and his attraction to another woman. Numerous illustrations show the entanglement of the work's poetic form and its material survival. Eisner provides a fresh reading of Dante's innovations, demonstrating the value of this philological analysis of the work's survival in the world.

A Boccaccian Renaissance brings together essays written by internationally recognized scholars in diverse national traditions to respond to the largely unaddressed question of Boccaccio's impact on early modern literature and culture in Italy and Europe. Martin Eisner and David Lummus co-edit the first comprehensive examination in English of Boccaccio's impact on the Renaissance.The essays investigate what it means to follow a Boccaccian model, in tandem with or in place of ancient authors such as Vergil or Cicero, or modern poets such as Dante or Petrarch. The book probes how deeply the Latin and vernacular works of Boccaccio spoke to the Renaissance humanists of the fifteenth century. It treats not only the literary legacy of Boccaccio's works but also their paradoxical importance for the history of the Italian language and reception in theater and books of conduct.While the geographical focus of many of the essays is on Italy, the volume concludes with three studies that open new inroads to understanding his influence on Spanish, French, and English writers across the sixteenth century. The book will appeal strongly to scholars and students of Boccaccio, the Italian and European Renaissance, and Italian literature.Contributors: Jonathan Combs-Schilling, Rhiannon Daniels, Martin Eisner, Simon Gilson, James Hankins, Timothy Kircher, Victoria Kirkham, David Lummus, Ronald L. Martinez, Ignacio Navarrete, Brian Richardson, Marc Schachter, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr

Giovanni Boccaccio played a pivotal role in the extraordinary emergence of the Italian literary tradition in the fourteenth century, not only as author of the Decameron, but also as scribe of Dante, Petrarch and Cavalcanti. Using a single codex written entirely in Boccaccio's hand, Martin Eisner brings together material philology and literary history to reveal the multiple ways Boccaccio authorizes this vernacular literary tradition. Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of Boccaccio as a biographer, storyteller, editor and scribe, who constructs arguments, composes narratives, compiles texts and manipulates material forms to legitimize and advance a vernacular literary canon. Situating these philological activities in the context of Boccaccio's broader reflections on poetry in the Decameron and the Genealogy of the Gentile Gods, the book produces a new portrait of Boccaccio that integrates his vernacular and Latin works, while also providing a new context for understanding his fictions.