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32 - Theories of prose fiction and poetics in Italy: novella and romanzo (1525–1596)

from THEORIES OF PROSE FICTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Glyn P. Norton  and
Marga Cottino-Jones
Edited by
Glyn P. Norton
Glyn P. Norton
Affiliation:
Williams College, Massachusetts
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Summary

Narrative fiction in Italy was already strongly rooted in the heritage of Boccaccio and his successors by the time Pietro Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua appeared in 1525, having earned a conspicuous place within the prevailing literary tastes and social codes of the day. In Book II of Castiglione's The courtier, Federico Fregoso describes the practice of ‘long and continuous discourse’ [‘ragionar lungo e continuato’] by certain men who ‘so gracefully and entertainingly narrate [‘con tanto bona grazia e così piacevolmente narrano’] …, that with gestures and words they put it before our eyes and almost bring us to touch it with our hand’. Fregoso's homage to the gift of narration is striking not only for its social ratification of a broad literary trend, but for the way it frames this gift within qualities of presentation that give a subtle nod to the concept of enargeia and the rhetoric of presence discussed by François Rigolot elsewhere in the present volume. Strongly reminiscent of Leon Battista Alberti's remarks on istoria in the Della pittura (c. 1435), Fregoso's statement sanctions the practice of narration as a social event vested with its own aesthetic and rhetorical justification. The reach of this activity extends even into such paraliterary forms as letters and treatises (political, theoretical/descriptive, moral/philosophical) where fictional narratives are frequently embedded as diversions in a larger ‘scientific’ project (for example, the letters of Pietro Aretino and Giambattista Marino, Aretino's Ragionamenti and Carte parlanti, and Alessandro Piccolomini's La Raffaella).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 322 - 336
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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