Opening to passion as an unsettling, transformative force; extending desire to the text, expanding the self, and dissolving its boundaries; imagining pleasures outside the norm and intensifying them; overcoming loss and reaching beyond death; being loyal to oneself and defying productivity, resolution, and cohesion while embracing paradox, non-linearity, incompletion. These are some of the possibilities of lyric that this book explores by reading Petrarch’s vernacular poetry in dialogue with that of other poets, including Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, and Shakespeare. In the Epilogue, the poet Antonella Anedda Angioy engages with Ossip Mandel’štam and Paul Celan’s dialogue with Petrarch and extends it into the present.
Table of Contents
- A ‘Miscellaneous Enterprise’
- 1. The Shape of Desire: Metamorphosis and Hybridity in Rvf 23 and Rvf 70
- 2. Openness and Intensity: Petrarch’s Becoming Laurel in Rvf 23 and Rvf 228
- 3. ‘Lust in Action’: Control and Abandon in Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare
- 4. Declensions of ‘Now’: Lyric Epiphanies in Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch
- 5. Extension: Reaching the Beloved in Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch
- 6. Body: Dante’s and Petrarch’s Lyric Eschatologies
- Radure / Clearings
