In Their Own Terms

by Francesco Pontuale

2007 · Peter Lang

In a historical period of international and global frames of literary investigation, In Their Own Terms is a timely and valuable contribution to cross-cultural forms of dialogue between non-American modes of analysis and US American literary studies. It is a wide-ranging and provocative look into American literary historiography that engages readers in analytical examinations of US literary histories considered landmarks in their field, from the early nineteenth-century work of Samuel L. Knapp to the newly completed Cambridge volumes. It focuses on texts that have had a decisive influence in constructing dominant understandings of American literature, its various genres, significant historical periods, and major writers, both inside and outside the United States. For the first time, this work compares and contrasts the tradition of US literary historiography with Italian histories of American literature. Characterized as they are by the particularities of the Italian cultural scene, these histories have always been conversant with US literary historiography, beginning with Gustavo Strafforello in 1884 and continuing in Agostino Lombardo's most recent series. In Their Own Terms cogently argues that American literary histories, regardless of the different critical and theoretical principles on which they are based, have invariably played an important role in national cohesion and in articulating an autonomy that is cultural as well as academic.

The Defeat of a Renaissance Intellectual

by Francesco Guicciardini

2019 · Penn State Press

A papal advisor and sixteenth-century power broker, Francesco Guicciardini wrote voluminously throughout his time in service to the Medici. The texts in this volume chart his career chronologically, revealing an intellectual whose philosophy of self-interest failed not only to perceive the interests of others but ultimately to serve his own. During Guicciardini’s life, Florentine politics was dominated by the struggle of republican leaders to retain civic political autonomy against the ambitions of the Medici family. Like Machiavelli and Petrarch, and arguably even Dante, Guicciardini was what Carlo Celli calls an “establishment intellectual,” one whose talents furthered the hegemony of authoritarian rule against the interests of his own class. The letters, treatises, reports, and orations included in this volume span Guicciardini’s long career, from his first appointment as ambassador to the Spanish court to just a few years before his forced retirement from political life. They reveal Guicciardini’s role as a protagonist in the events related in his famous History of Italy (1540), shed light on the self-recriminations and remorse that sometimes gnawed at his conscience, and explain why, ultimately, Guicciardini fell from political grace into irrelevance. Through these previously untranslated writings, The Defeat of a Renaissance Intellectual evidences the hard lessons Guicciardini learned in service to the Medici: working within a corrupt system does not lead to solutions, and reason and self-interest are not foolproof guides for predicting human behavior. This book will appeal especially to scholars who study the Medici clan, the Italian Wars, and Renaissance politics and history.