Text

theses

My dissertation investigates the relationship that Boccaccio’s Decameron and Basile’s less-studied Lo cunto de li cunti: overo lo trattenemiento de’ peccerille establish with the heritage of A Thousand and One Nights by focusing on a triad of motifs (esotericism, eroticism, and exoticism) through which the Arabic prose tradition is subsumed in the Italian literary tradition. Through a comparative and critical approach of these particular collections, my dissertation both highlights the importance of Italian language and literature in the contemporary academy and challenges the cultural stereotypes that continue to blur the lens through which many still approach Arabic heritage. In Chapter 1, I analyze the three collections in terms of structure and content (the cornice novellistica and the power of words) with constant references to criticism and literary theory, demonstrating how Boccaccio and Basile’s narrative frameworks emulate the structural and thematic organization of the Arabic masterpiece. In Chapter 2, I further examine recurrent esoteric elements such as enchantment, alchemy, black magic, genies, ghosts, ogres and other fantastical creatures and explore the relationship between reale and fiabesco, two specular categories the combination of which aims at describing the extra/ordinary world of the seventeenth century. Chapter 3 is devoted to the role of love, sexuality and licentiousness in these texts as categories that provide insight into the evolving mores and transitional natures of their societies; particular attention is devoted to the many forms and different functions of similar, if not identical, sexual metaphors present in all three narrative collections, and to the phenomenology of love, the antecedents of which harken back to the Arab tradition of Ibn Sina and Ibn Hazm and the principles and ideas of which emerge in texts like the Decameron and Lo cunto de li cunti. In Chapter 4, I scrutinize the representation of the “Orient” in all three collections, arguing that even in the Arabic text itself, the Eastern setting of the tales remains only a fictive space that can be easily interchanged with a more westernized space.

ETD_6705

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Marino Forlino

doi:10.7282/T39K4D6X

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.