Local Habitation and a Name

Albert Russell Ascoli is Terrill Distinguished Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has recently published Dante and the Making of a Modern Author.

. . . A rich feast . . . in which all students of Italian Renaissance literature will find substantial food for thought. (—Renaissance Quarterly) Combining uncommon erudition with a rigorous commitment to critical theory,Albert Ascoli masterfully illuminates the cultural interlacing of power and knowledge—of "cesare" and "poeta"—in early modern Italy. Whether showing how Petrarch uses his letters to define the place of the man of letters in relation to those in power, examining the literary dimension of Machiavelli's anti-literary treatise, The Prince, or considering the construction of masculinity in Ariosto's Orlando furioso, Ascoli's essays in this elegant collection meditate on the the twin problems of historicizing literature and writing literary history.---—Teodolinda Barolini, Columbia University An important book by an important scholar, this volume should be in collections supporting study of Italian and early modern literature and history. . . Highly Recommended. (—Choice) Ascoli reflects rigorously and consistently on the interdependence/disjunction between history and literature, on the link between New historicism and New criticism. In his pragmatic sense of the act of reading, he opposes viscerally all abstract theoretical constructions, and he resists, in a steady show of superb analytical writing, all complacent generalized "solutions",politically engaged writing, and rigid moralizations, and de facto he reproposes close reading as the abiding model for the future of the profession."---—Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University