Lucian of Samosata in Early Modern Italian Literature - An Anti-paradigmatic Paradigma.

• Applicant: Dr. Irene Fantappiè
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 363837442

The first aim of the project (1) is a comprehensive investigation and new interpretation of the reception of Lucian of Samosata in early modern Italian literature. (2) Secondly, the project seeks to employ an analysis of Lucian's influence to shed light on some crucial and not yet fully acknowledged aspects of Renaissance Italian literature. In the past decades, scholarship has unanimously pointed to two conflicting phases in the reception of Lucian in early modern Italy: in the fifteenth century he is considered a 'didactic-moral' author, whereas the late sixteenth century reads Lucian as a 'heterodox-heretical' writer. Both the literary and poetological significance and the sociocultural and political significance of Lucian for the Italian Renaissance has, however, been overlooked on three levels: (a) chronological (the early fifteenth century), (b) textual (Lucian in the vernacular), and (c) methodological (Lucian's authorship). (1) As far as the reception of Lucian in early modern Italy is concerned, the main assumption of the project is that the two phases identified by scholarship should be combined with a third phase, which is situated between them and has so far been entirely disregarded. In this phase Lucian is interpreted as an author who is both 'delightful' (piacevole) and 'useful' (utile), an author who is able to create a paradoxical unity between opposite elements (playfulness and seriousness, anti-normativity and normativity, the gesture of lying and that of telling the truth). The aim of the project is to show that the reception of Lucian as a 'delightful and useful' author (a) takes place in the early sixteenth century and is linked with both (b) the circulation of the vernacular translations of his texts and (c) the characteristics of his authorship. (2) Taking its cue from an analysis of the reception of Lucian in the Renaissance, the project strives to reinterpret some aspects and authors of early modern Italian literature, focusing firstly on Pietro Aretino and secondly on some of the so-called 'poligrafi' (Niccolò Franco, Antonfrancesco Doni, Ortensio Lando, Lodovico Domenichi), who were active in Venice during the sixteenth century. The project will investigate the role played by Lucian for both Aretino and the 'poligrafi' starting from the assumption that he influenced them as an 'anti-paradigmatic paradigm', both on a literary and poetological level and on a sociocultural and political level. The two main goals of this part of the project are on the one side to investigate Aretino's relationship with classical antiquity and question his reputation as an anti-classical author, and on the other side to shed new light on the literary production of the poligrafi, which goes far beyond a mere imitation of the Lucianic writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam and of Thomas More.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants