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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Problems of method
- 2 History and invention in the dialogue
- 3 The uses of the dialogue in sixteenth-century Italy: celebration and control
- 4 The uses of the dialogue in sixteenth-century Italy: commerce and courtesy
- 5 Castiglione's Cortegiano: the dialogue as a drama of doubt
- 6 The changing form of the Italian Renaissance dialogue
- 7 The theory and practice of the dialogue in Counter-Reformation Italy
- 8 From the ‘girevole strada’ to the straight and narrow path
- 9 From the open dialogue to the closed book
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Problems of method
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Problems of method
- 2 History and invention in the dialogue
- 3 The uses of the dialogue in sixteenth-century Italy: celebration and control
- 4 The uses of the dialogue in sixteenth-century Italy: commerce and courtesy
- 5 Castiglione's Cortegiano: the dialogue as a drama of doubt
- 6 The changing form of the Italian Renaissance dialogue
- 7 The theory and practice of the dialogue in Counter-Reformation Italy
- 8 From the ‘girevole strada’ to the straight and narrow path
- 9 From the open dialogue to the closed book
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I will not here take notice of the several kinds of Dialogue, and the whole Art of it, which wou'd ask an entire Volume to perform. This has been a Work long wanted, and much desir'd, of which the Ancients have not sufficiently inform'd us; and I question whether any Man, now living, can treat it accurately.
John Dryden, Life of Lucian (1711)Three centuries after Dryden wrote this passage, the work he refers to is still ‘wanted’ and the chief obstacle which confronts the student of any of the ‘kinds’ of literary dialogue remains the lack of any substantial and coherent theoretical discussion of the genre. As Dryden notes, the Ancients – and most significantly Aristotle – gave little indication of what form such a theory might take, and subsequent critics have found themselves rather in the position of Northrop Frye's Renaissance doctors, who refused to take syphilis seriously because Galen had made no mention of it. For a brief period in the sixteenth century in Italy, when the vogue for the literary dialogue was at its height, there was a sustained attempt to bring the dialogue into the fold of Aristotelian genre criticism. But this initiative waned with the subsequent decline in the popular fortunes of the genre, and its provisional conclusion – that the dialogue was, in Tasso's formula, a fusion of dialectic and poetry – did not stand the dialogue in good stead in eras when poetry and non-poetry were ever more rigorously distinguished.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Renaissance DialogueLiterary Dialogue in its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo, pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992