Italy and the English Renaissance.

Piero Boitani's eclectic range of textual references in The Tragic and the Sublime, encompassing passages from Chaucer, Dante, Petrarch, Guillaume de Deguileville, Hemingway, and Seamus Heaney, is indicative of the ambitious critical scope of this study. Beginning with the much discussed problem of the 'alterity' and 'modernity' of medieval literature, he outlines in a strongly argued introduction some broad, preliminary distinctions between the 'tragic' and the 'sublime' elements in medieval narratives. Defining the 'tragic' as being located in an incident, image, or story, illustrative of man's inescapable conflict with himself and the world around him, the 'sublime' is seen to occur at the opposite pole, when a moment or experience uplifts the soul into a sense of intoxicating joy and exaltation. At …