World Classics

Dante Boccaccio Tasso Ariosto Machiavelli Moravia

Dante Alighieri

• Born in 1265

• Avid student of philosophy and poetry.

• Magnum opus : Divine Comedy

• Long narrative poem originally composed in Italian.

• The Inferno, The Purgatorio and The Paradiso

• Written in terza rima (lines of eleven syllables

arranged in groups of three and rhyming ababcbcdc)
Inferno

• Journey of Dante through Hell. Guided by Virgil.

• It is portrayed as nine concentric circles of torment

located within the earth

• It is the place of those who have rejected spiritual

values by engaging in bestial appetites or violence or
by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice
against their fellowmen.
Purgatorio

• Its about an allegory telling of the climb of Dante up

the mount of Purgatory guided by Virgil. In the last
four cantos he is guided by Beatrice.

• Allegorically the Purgatorio represents the penitent

Christian life.

• While describing the climb he discusses the nature of

sin examples of sin and virtue as well as moral issues
in politics and church.
Paradiso

• Paradise is depicted as a series of concentric spheres

surrounding the earth consisting of the moon, mercury,
Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Fixed stars and
so on.

• It is a vision of a world of beauty, light and song, where

the poet’s guide is Beatrice.

• An exposition of the future life, but a work of moral

instruction, full of symbolism and allusions based on
Dante’s wide knowledge of philosophy, astronomy, natural
science and history.
Giovanni Boccaccio

• Italian writer and humanist.

• Wrote his imaginative literature in Tuscan vernacular as

well as other in Latin.

• His formative years from about 1325 until 1340 were

spent in Naples.

• He returned to his birthplace Florence in 1340 and

witnessed the ravages of the Black Death in 1348
described in the introduction to the first day his best
known work the Decameron
• Boccaccio’s literary production is characterised by an
unusual versatility; his work, both in prose and verse,
contains a variety of genres, destined to exercise a
powerful influence on succeeding generations.

•
Decameron

• Magnum opus

• A collection of 100 tales told over a period of ten days.

• Marks a new departure in author’s trajectory

• Deal no more with Trojan princess or even woodland

nymphs or allegory

• The essential feature of The Decameron is realism

• The world of the tales is the world of here and now.

• Demographic range is wide which includes lords,
princes, merchants, bankers, doctors, scholars,
peasants priests , monk and a surprising number of
women.

• Seven of the ten “frame characters” or narrators are

women.

• The Decameron is democratic, feminist and au fond

optimistic.

• It celebrates especially quick wittedness as the best

instrument for success in all walks of life.
• The works had much influence on English Literature,
notably on Chaucer, sixteen of the tales were
incorporated in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure .

• John Keats and Alfred Lord Tennyson both produced

versions of individual tales.
Torquato Tasso (1544-1595)

• Italian poet and playwright

• Best known for his Jerusalem Delivered

• Tried his hand in almost all literary genres practised in

Italy during the late renaissance

• Spent most os his adult life as a courtier

• He wrote the lyric, religious and occasional verse, epic

poetry, plays, dialogues, letters, and literary criticism .
• Alphonso II of Este to lock him as mad from 1579 to
1586.

• In the Jerusalem Delivered, discipline and indulgence,

piety and sensuality, jealousy and magnanimity, hope
and disillusionment, love and solitude, cowardice and
valour, calculation and ingenuousness, history and
invention, theatricality and simplicity, the epic and the
lyric all combine in an impassioned poetic texture that
is unique in the tradition of chivalric epic.
• Is an epic poem in 20 cantos of Ottawa Rima.

• Actions concerns the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 during the

First Crusade.

• This poem is an overtly serious work, stoutly Christian and

explicitly moralistic.

• Other chief works include : Aminta, Rinaldo, Il Re Torrismodno.

• He penned over 1500 occasional poems on a very wide

variety of subjects.

• His prose works encompass letters, dialogues and literary

discourses.
• Was an influential figure to many men of letters
including, John Milton, Goethe, Lord Byron
Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533)

• Italian playwright and poet

• Noted for his poem Orlando Furioso (the greatest of

Italian chivalric or romance epics.)

• Also wrote Italian and Latin lyrics, satires modelled

upon Horace and four comedies, emulating ancient
Roman comedy but set in the contemporary world
Orlando Furioso
• Published in 1532 designed to exalt the house of Este and to continue the
story of Orlando’s love for Angelica begun by Boiardo in Orlando innamorato.

• Saracens (Arab Muslims) and Christians are at war.

• Saracens under Agramant, king of Africa with the help of regimes besieging
Charlemagne in Paris. Angelica had been left by Charlemagne to the care of
Namo, escapes. Orlando, chief of the Paladins, hopelessly infatuated with
Angelica, forgets his duty and pursues her. Angelica falls in love with
Moorish youth Medoro and marries. Learning their story, Orlando is seized
with a furious and grotesque madness and he destroys everything in his path.
Then he was finally captured by his own companions and miraculously
cured of his madness and his love.

• In a conclusive battle he kills Agramant

• In constructing this sequel to Boiardo’s poem Ariosto had
three main tasks: to bring the war to a close, to disentangle
both Orlando and Rinaldo from their infatuation for
Angelica, and to enable Rinaldo’s sister, Bradamante, to marry
a noble warrior, Ruggeiero, who though fighting for the
Indfidel to descend the illustrious line of the House of Este.

• Ariosto’s other works include Capitoli (burlesques), satires

and five comedies on the models of Plautus and Terence
whose plays were then fashionable in Ferrara.

• Ariosto had acted in the court theatre in his youth and

during his last years he was director of theatrical
entertainments.
Machiavelli Niccolo

• Was an Italian Renaissance diplomat, philosopher and writer

best known for The Prince (II Principe) written in 1513.

• Often he has been called the father of modern political

philosophy and political science.

• He wrote comedies, carnival songs and poetry.

• His The Prince (II Principe) contains several maxims

concerning politics.

• His name came to evoke unscrupulous politicians of the sort

he advised in this work.
• He proposed that immoral behaviour, such as the use of
deceit and the murder of innocents, was normal and effective
in politics.

• He encouraged politicians to engage in evil when it would be

necessary for political expediency.

• This work gained notoriety due to claims that it teaches “evil

recommendation to tyrants to help them maintain their
power.”

• Scholars often note that Machiavelli glorifies instrumentality

in state building, an approach embodied by the saying, often
attributed to interpretations of The Prince, “The ends justify
the means.”
• Fraud and deceit are held by Machiavelli as necessary
for a prince to use.

• Violence may be necessary for the successful

stabilization of power and introduction of new political
institutions.

• Machiavelli has become infamous for such political

advice, ensuring that he would be remembered in
history through the adjective “Machiavellian”

•
Alberto Moravia (1907-1990)

• He made his fortune with his very first novel, Gli

indifferenti (The Time of Indifference) written when he was
only 22.

• It captured the spirit of the times both in Italy and

elsewhere in Europe, depicting in a provocatively realists,
rather than an evocatively suggestive, the existential crisis
of man, and the dramatic transvaluation of moral, social,
and political values.

• Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus admired the novel and

perhaps owed something to it.
• Moravia’s main strength as a novelist lies in his ability
to combine the true and the realistic in a satirical vein,
and apply them to his critique of man and society.

• He was a member of the Community Party - seems to

have been little more than a strategy. Though he was
not prevented from writing in the Milanese daily with
its rather right-wing sympathies.

• The Time of Indifference, is considered to be the first

existentialist novel that sets out not only to castigate the
decadent Italian bourgeoisie a society of depraved and
unhappy but materially rich people, but also exposes
the domineering role that sex and money play in it.