The Decameron: Selected Tales - Tapa blanda

"Furnished with an engaging selection of tales, a formidable apparatus of primary texts and reproductions [from the] visual arts, this is an ideal text for a course in English on Boccaccio's Decameron. The translators have struck an enviable balance between the colloquial valences of the dialogue and the more formal moments of its register, all while untangling the complex syntax that can be daunting to the non-specialist....This is a Decameron that is accessible and comprehensible, inviting the general reader into its rich narrative world." -Kristina M. Olson, George Mason University "Boccaccio... is unsurpassed in the illuminating perspective from which he explores the variety of dramas of his characters in their day to day interactions,... [and this] rendition of the Decameron is extraordinary: it breathes fresh life into this classic of world literature." -Giuseppe Mazzotta, Sterling Professor in the Humanities for Italian, Yale University "The translators have provided a smart and engaging selection of the best tales of the Decameron. Their lively prose translation successfully captures the oral scene of storytelling that is central to the book while still attending to important specifics of Boccaccio's language. A carefully conceived collection of secondary readings completes this volume, which will allow readers to enjoy Boccaccio's masterpiece from a variety of perspectives." -Michael Sherberg, Washington University

The editors have selected 33 of the 100 tales, including at least two from each of the ten days of storytelling. Included as well are Boccaccio's general introduction and conclusion to the work, as well as the introduction and conclusion to the first day; the reader is thus provided with a real sense of the Decameron's framing narrative. In selecting from among the tales themselves, the editors have looked to include the most interesting, the most representative, and the most widely taught of the tales, as well as a few (such as X.8, on the theme of perfect friendship) that are less familiar but that the editors feel to be deserving of wider circulation. The Beecher and Ciavolella translation conveys some sense of the often extended structures of Boccaccio's sentences, and a real sense as well of the different registers Boccaccio uses, from the often formal tone of the framing narrative to the highly colloquial feel of the dialogue in many of the more bawdy tales. Throughout, the translators have chosen language that makes this classic work accessible to twenty-first-century undergraduates. The edition includes extensive explanatory notes and a concise but wide-ranging introduction to Boccaccio's life and times, as well as to the Decameron itself. A unique selection of contextual materials concludes the volume; these include documentary accounts and illustrations of the Black Death in Florence; examples of source materials that Boccaccio drew on; examples from later medieval and early modern literature (both in Italy and in England) of work that was heavily influenced by the Decameron; documents (including Petrarch's famous comments about the tale of Patient Griselda) providing a sense of the early reception history of the work; and a variety of illustrations from early manuscripts of the Decameron. Like the versions provided of the Boccaccio tales themselves, the texts in this selection of "In Context" materials have been newly translated for this edition.