This book brings together, in a novel and exciting combination, three authors who have written movingly about mourning: two medieval Italian poets, Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca, and one early twentieth-century French novelist, Marcel Proust. Each of these authors, through their respective narratives of bereavement, grapples with the challenge of how to write adequately about the deeply personal and painful experience of grief. In Jennifer Rushworth's analysis, discourses of mourning emerge as caught between the twin, conflicting demands of a comforting, readable, shared generality and a silent, solitary respect for the uniqueness of any and every experience of loss. Rushworth explores a variety of major questions in the book, including: what type of language is appropriate to mourning? What effect does mourning have on language? Why and how has the Orpheus myth been so influential on discourses of mourning across different time periods and languages? Might the form of mourning described in a text and the form of closure achieved by that same text be mutually formative and sustaining? In this way, discussion of the literary representation of mourning extends to embrace topics such as the medieval sin of acedia, the proper name, memory, literary epiphanies, the image of the book, and the concept of writing as promise. In addition to the three primary authors, Rushworth draws extensively on the writings of Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. These rich and diverse psychoanalytical and French theoretical traditions provide terminological nuance and frameworks for comparison, particularly in relation to the complex term melancholia.

"Mark Musa, in editing and translating Petrarch's Canzoniere, has performed a wonderful service to the English-speaking reader. Here, in one volume, are included the poet's own selection of the best lyric verse he wrote throughout his life, accompanied by brief but useful notes . . . " —Chronicles "As well as skillful and fluent verse renderings of the 366 lyrics that make up this milestone in the development of Western poetic tradition, Musa offers copious and up-to-date annotation to each poem . . . along with a substantial, sensitive, and intelligent introduction that is genuinely helpful for the first-time reader and thought provoking for Petrarch scholars and other medievalists." —Choice The 366 poems of Petrarch's Canzoniere represent one of the most influential works in Western literature. Varied in form, style, and subject matter, these "scattered rhymes" contains metaphors and conceits that have been absorbed into the literature and language of love. In this bilingual edition, Mark Musa provides verse translations, annotations, and an introduction co-authored with Barbara Manfredi.

Although Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) is best known today for cementing the sonnet’s place in literary history, he was also a philosopher, historian, orator, and one of the foremost classical scholars of his age. Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works is the only comprehensive, single-volume source to which anyone—scholar, student, or general reader—can turn for information on each of Petrarch’s works, its place in the poet’s oeuvre, and a critical exposition of its defining features. A sophisticated but accessible handbook that illuminates Petrarch’s love of classical culture, his devout Christianity, his public celebrity, and his struggle for inner peace, this encyclopedic volume covers both Petrarch’s Italian and Latin writings and the various genres in which he excelled: poem, tract, dialogue, oration, and letter. A biographical introduction and chronology anchor the book, making Petrarch an invaluable resource for specialists in Italian, comparative literature, history, classics, religious studies, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of European history and culture between the 14th and 17th centuries. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibliographies.com.