Add to ORKGThis study investigates the transformations of the epic code of Western tradition in Dante’s Commedia, Boccaccio’s Teseida, and Petrarch’s Africa. Although none of the foundational works of early Italian literature between XIII and XIV century can be defined as an epic in the canonical sense of the term, in that age of cultural transition in which vernacular culture emerged and new subjectivities took shape, an “epic intention” was at work in a culture that was in search of new articulations for its sense of beginning, continuity, and totality. In particular, a new relation to the past, especially to antiquity, had to be negotiated. For all their differences as to form, outcome, language, intention, context, and composition history, the Com...
