Il genere 'tenzone' nelle letterature romanze delle origini (Atti del convegno di Losanna, 13-15 novembre 1997).(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-APR-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association

Il genere 'tenzone' nelle letterature romanze delle origini (Atti del convegno di Losanna, 13-15 novembre 1997). Ed. by MATTEO PEDRONI and ANTONIO STAUBLE. (Memoria del tempo, 15) Ravenna: Longo. 1999. 412 pp. 31 [euro]. ISBN 88-8063-192-6.

It might seem surprising but, at the time of the conference that produced this book, the systematic study of Italian poetic tenzoni had not been tackled for almost seventy years, since Salvatore Santangelo published his pioneering book Le tenzoni poetiche nella letteraturaitaliana delle origini (Geneva: Olschki, 1928). This may well reflect the complexity inherent in the contextualization of a blurred genre which encompasses a broad range of different themes, registers, and metrical forms. The book reviewed here has the great merit of adopting a comparative and 'interdisciplinary' approach (as pointed out by the editors, p. 7) that brings together a number of Romance literatures (Italian, French, Provencal, Spanish, and Portuguese) considered under a range of different perspectives, including those of Latin antecedents and modern semiotic theory. In this context, Claudio Giunta's two...

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