Pier Pasolini's "trilogy of life" is a series of film adaptations of major texts of the past: The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and One Thousand and One Nights. The movies demonstrate a film author's acute aesthetic sensibility through a highly original cinematic rendering of the sources. The first two films, closely examined in this book, offer a personal, purposefully stylized vision of the Middle Ages, as though Pasolini were dreaming Boccaccio's and Chaucer's texts through the filter of his "heretic" consciousness. The unusual poetic visualization of the source works, which could be described as irreverent cinematic homage, has the potential to renew the traditional reading of such literature. This book shows how cinema becomes an alternative form of storytelling. It first studies the two films in detail, putting them in perspective within the trilogy. Next it interprets them, recounting misinterpretations and expounding upon Pasolini's ideological perception, and defends the oft-criticized adaptations. Finally, it discusses how the films represent innovation over strict adaptation. Appendices offer charts with information on the narrative structures of the films and the correspondences between them.

Anthology from the year 2011 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 2.1, Churchill College, Cambridge, language: English, abstract: Over forty essays on English Literature,all the product of deep reading and thinking about some of the landmark texts of the literary canon and some of the more obscure byways of English Literature. An insightful overview of the entire subject with detailed critiques on many key texts and original writing on more obscure ones.

A collection of essays on the work of controversial Italian writer, dramatist, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Contributions focus on Pasolini's self-involvement and his analyses of language, aesthetics, and film, among other topics. Attention is also given to differences in Pasolini's reception

A comparison of Chaucer and Boccaccio sheds new light on both writers, indicating their mutual use of ancient comic literary traditions. Although many of Chaucer's sources have been exhaustively studied, relatively little work has been done on the influence of his contemporary Boccaccio, a gap which this book aims to fill. It examines the relationship of the comictales, the so-called fabliaux, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's Decameron, demonstrating that not only did Chaucer draw on Boccaccio's work, but that they shared the same comic literary tradition stretching back into antiquity. By putting the tales and the characters side-by-side, it throws new light on Chaucer's inventiveness and mode of working. Professor CAROL FALVO HEFFERNAN teaches at the Department of English, Rutgers University, New Jersey.

Discusses films such as Accatone, Mamma Roma, The Gospel according to Matthew, The hawks and the sparrows, Oedipus Rex, Medea, Teorema, Pigsty, The Decameron, The Canterbury tales, The Arabian nights, Salo, and others.

"Although in recent decades literary theorists have explored the interrelations between narrative and historical discourse, the relationship between history and poetry has remained largely unexamined. In The Poiesis of History, Keala Jewell offers insightful readings of three innovative postwar Italian poets - Pier Paolo Pasolini, Attilio Bertolucci, and Mano Luzi - who, she maintains, have developed a historicized "content of the form" with complex implications for postmodernist poetics and genre theory." "Jewell considers the historical dimensions of works by Pasolini (better known outside Italy as a film-maker), Bertolucci, and Luzi in such genres as sepulchral verse, elegy, lament, ballad, the novel in verse, and verse epic. Placing the poetry in its historical and cultural contexts, she shows how it reconceptualizes such pivotal events in twentieth-century Italian history as the agricultural strikes of 1908, the rise of Fascism in Emilia-Romagna, the death of the communist leader Antonio Gramsci, Italy's postwar reconstruction and social upheavals, and the assassination of ex-premier Aldo Moro by terrorist Red Brigades. In the light of the movement away from Hermeticism and Neorealism which has dominated Italian literature since the fifties, she examines the contributions of the three poets to literary and cultural criticism as well as to poetics." "This bold and original book will be welcomed by Italianists, literary theorists, comparatists, film historians, and theorists interested in post-modernism, genre studies, and the relations between history and literature."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved