Original scientific paper
On the Interpretive Metamorphoses of Dante's "Maiden"
Morana Čale
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
The two ballads and the sonnet that comprise the so called cycle for the maiden (rime pe la pargoletta) in Dante’s Rime have been widely analysed and diversely understood in Dante scholarship, mostly in
the light of Purgatorio XXXI 55-60, where Beatrice blames Dante for, among other things, having succumbed in the past to the charms of the “pargoletta”. As is the case with other female figures in Dante’s work, the interpretations of the maiden - who is also mentioned in the last verse of one of the “stone poems” (rime petrose), “Io son venuto al punto de la rota” (“I have reached that point of the circuit”) - range from those prevalently based on biographical conjectures to those that assign allegorical meanings to her. The present essay argues for the possibility of considering the pargoletta cycle as a specimen of Dante’s lyrical texts envisioning their own metatextual readability as a performative variant of their constative interpretations, whether biographical or allegorical.
Keywords
Dante; Rime; the poems for the maiden; the stone poems; Purgatory; Beatrice; metatextual readability; performative interpretation
Hrčak ID:
191596
URI
Publication date:
28.12.2017.
Visits: 2.024 *