Adventures in speech : rhetoric and narration in Boccaccio's Decameron / Pier Massimo Forni.

Adventures in speech : rhetoric and narration in Boccaccio's Decameron / Pier Massimo Forni.

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, ©1996.

xiv, 155 p. ; 24 cm

Middle Ages series

The Decameron is a narrative account of a situation in which narration takes place - a collection of one hundred stories set within a larger story. As a group of young men and women fleeing the plague trade stories to pass the time of crisis, storytelling occurs in a social context that allows for comment upon the tales by the tellers themselves, in a setting that elicits one story in return for another. In his close and original analysis, Pier Massimo Forni uses the notion of rhetoric as a guiding principle for a critical assessment of the Decameron. He explores the discursive tools with which the narrators connect the contents of their stories to their audience's environment, and goes on to argue that the book is significantly marked by Boccaccio's habit of exploring the narrative potential of rhetorical forms. Puzzling narrative segments and stories make new sense once they are understood to dramatize or enact metaphors and other figures of speech.

Parts of this work were previously published in Italian.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [141]-151) and index.

Ch. 1. Configurations of Discourse
Ch. 2. Pleasure and Response
Ch. 3. Realism and the Needs of the Story
Ch. 4. The Poetics of Realization
Ch. 5. Rhetoric and Narration in the Story of Zima
Appendix: Horror of Incest and Seduction of Literature in Boccaccio's Decameron.

Middle Ages series.

United States -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia.

PQ4295 .F67 1996

268208