Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Olivia Holmes's book, originally a variation on her Doctoral thesis, traces the evolution of the phenomenon of the single-authored collection of poetry, in the light of the transition from oral tradition to vernacular writing in the Middle Ages. It starts from a consideration of the ramifications of the shift from the case of multi-authored anthologies of poetry to that of the single-authored collection, which expresses the writer's individual ideas and beliefs in poetry and writing.
The prose is lucid, and hard to fault for its immense clarity. In the book itself, Holmes shows a consideration of the text(s) she studies as products not only of an intimate engagement with historical-literary phenomena, but also as expressions of the authors' capabilities in writing and their self-reflexive dimensions of thought as poets writing either against or in line with inherited literary models of the Middle Ages(or both).
The book was indispensable to my work as a Honours student, because of the groundbreaking work it offered in relation to Dante's Vita Nuova, and the the study of Italian poetry's development as a whole during the Middle Ages. Culminating as part of a recent latent insurgence against the traditional opposition between medieval conformity and renaissance individualism within literary circles, Olivia Holmes's scholarly will prove rewarding, for its ability to prove medieval Italian poetry as a ground for laying down the foundations to both the expression and the psychological phenomenon of individualism itself.
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