Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture

Content: Dante and the lyric past--
Guittone\'s Ora parrá, Dante\'s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia\'s anatomy of desire--
Dante and Cavalcanti (on making distinctions in matters of love) : Inferno 5 in its lyrics and autobiographical context--
Medieval multiculturalism and Dante\'s technology of hell--
Why did Dante write the Commedia? Dante and the visionary tradition--
Minos\'s tail : the labor of devising hell (Aeneid 6.431-33 and Inferno 5.1-24)--
Q : Does Dante hope for Vergil\'s salvation? A : Why do we care? For the very reason we should not ask the question--
Arachne, Argus, and St. John : transgressive art in Dante and Ovid--
Cominciandomi dal principio infino a la fine : forging anti-narrative in the Vita nuova--
The making of a lyric sequence : time and narrative in Petrarch\'s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta--
The wheel of the Decameron--
Editing Dante\'s Rime and Italian cultural history : Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca ... Barbi, Contini, Foster-Boyde, De Robertis--
Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi : toward a sexual poetics of the Decameron (Decameron 2.9, 2.10, 5.10)--
Dante and Francesca da Rimini : realpolitik, romance, gender--
Sotto benda : gender in the lyrics of Dante and Guittone d\' Arezzo (with a brief excursus on Cecco d\'Ascoli)--
Notes toward a gendered history of Italian literature, with a discussion of Dante\'s Beatrix Loquax.