Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron
By: David Wallace.
Series: Landmarks of world literature
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1991
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 117
Subjects: Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1313-1375
Other titles: Boccaccio, Decameron.
Description: In Boccaccio's innovative text ten young people leave Florence to escape the Black Death of 1348, and organize their collective life in the countryside through the pleasure and discipline of storytelling. David Wallace guides the reader through their one hundred novelle, which explore both new and familiar conflicts with unprecendented subtlety, urgency and humor: everything from the struggle for domestic space, fought out between individual men and women, to the greater politics of the Mediterranean world where Christian and Arab meet. He emphasizes the relationship between the Decameron and the precocious proto-capitalist culture of Boccaccio's Florence. He also discusses gender issues and the influence of the text, particularly on Chaucer and on the novel.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 114-117).
Cover title: Boccaccio, Decameron.