"A short history of Italian literature" by J.H. Whitfield (Penguin, 1960)

Introduction

"At certain obvious points the history of Italian literature fuses with the history of Italy ... The first flowering [] is that associated with the [France influenced] Sicilian school ... Then Florence assumes that cultural primacy ... The architect of this ascendancy is Dante ... Boccaccio, Petrarch ... Machiavelli dies in 1527, the Florentine Republic gives place to a principality in 1530. Florence has ceased to be the mainspring of Italian literature ...it is Boiardo, with the Orlando Innamorato, who marks the first step to the establishment of Ferrara as the epicentre of the multifarious Cinquecento ...Hereafter a lethargy [] Not for nothing is the great name of the Seicento the scientific one of Galileo ... Venice alone [] recovers its territory. its trade, and its prosperity. But the fruits thereof are rather Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, Palladio, than in prose or poetry ... No major changes break the gentle sleep till the rude wind of 1796."

Italian Lyric Poetry: from Sicilian School to Petrarch

• "the invention of the sonnet form ... is as important as the inheritance of the canzone. Out of this prosody, and with this set of conventions and poetic capital, and with for good measure the tricks and faults of the troubadours, will come the European lyric, and after Petrarch it is, as petrarchism, largely the tricks which are most apparent."
• "before Cino poetry was in the position of primitive painting. It could speak clearly, because it had the primitive's simplicity of colour and outline. Cino introduces a new tension between opposing elements, and offers a new horizon. After this the lyric may sin by sophistication, but it will not be linited by naivety. ... none before Cino builds a sonnet to a climax."
• "[After Petrarch] Nor will the Italian lyric achieve real greatness again till Tasso takes this further step, into the world of the senses."

From St Francis to Dante

• "For St Francis the world, as God's creation, was good, and all one needed [was] self-abasement ... for Jacopone the worse it was the better, with the greater compensation ... [For] Dante ... the world with the right remedies, under the right authorities, would itself be right. These were: Pope, Emperor, Aristotle, and at first sight it might seem that the latter should be Dante's guide."

The Prose Tradition to Boccaccio

• "The Duecento has little of original prose, and Dante's two works, the Vita Nuova and the Convicvio stand out as early landmarks ... There are two paths to its great early monument, the Decameron: through the rest of Boccaccio's writing, and through the undergrowth of the short story."
• "The Decameron, then, is neither the new world of the Renascence, nor a work of realism. It is a free work of the imagination, in which old tales are given as much life as Boccaccio can afford."
• "It was De Sanctis who said, [Boccaccio] writes like Cicero, and thinks like Plautus. And now this needs emendment, for this style - whose imitation was to burden Italian prose for several centuries - was born of medieval rhetoric, and looked to Livy for its Latin air."

Petrarch and the New World of Learning

• "Boccaccio stand with Petrarch in the discovery of texts, and ahead of him in appreciation of the importance due to Greek."
• "With Politan we have come to Latin verse instead of Latin prose, which is the main vehicle of the early Quattrocento, and its true voice."
• "for the next fifteen years Ariosto will lovingly correct [Orlando Furioso] in the spirit of Bembo's rules for the vulgar tongue; so that it becomes the pattern of Tuscan usage in the hands of a non-Tuscan, one of the main instruments for the victory of Tuscan as the Italian language ... And now finally, after this interlude, we are free to return to Italian literature, safe un the assurance that it will no longer be supplanted by a Latin counterpart."

From Petrarch and Boccaccio to Lorenzo and Politian

• "There is in Italian poetry nothing like the stanza of Politian before his time, and it is he who makes the achievement of Aristo possible."

Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and their Heirs

• "..."

Epic Poetry from Pulci to Tasso

• "As in Latin times, Italy imported its epic themes: not Troy, but the matiere de Charlemagne and the Authurian legends."
• "Nor must we ignore the herculean effort by which [Ariosto] bought the epic uphill from the morass into which it had descended, making of it the first shining monument of the poetry of the Cinquecento."
• "the magic which Ariosto retains is always trembling on the brink of allegory or rationalisation: it is because his sanity of outlook is impatient with a lack of meaning."
• "the Renascence['s] ... chief poet was Ariosto."

The Italian Theatre to the Pastor Fido

• "It follows then the general law of the fifteenth century: that those genres which are not fertilized from the classical side tend to wither."

Figures and Trends within the Cinquecento

• "Bembo is the non-Tuscan codifier of Tuscan speech for literary use. Here with gravity and lucidity Italian is finally put forward as preferable to Latin."
• "The sixteenth century sees the querelle des femmes, and in Italy there is an outcrop of feminist literature, notable in bulk if repetitive and insignificant in quality."

The Seventeenth Century

• "..."

In and out of Arcadia

• "[Octavio Rinuccini provided] clear characters, and the first opportunity for monody to replace the polyphony of the sixteenth century. The apparatus, and the rules, of tragedy are not abandoned, though they are clarified: a Messenger may still relate the most important parts; prologues, monologues, and moral sentences remain."
• "From the Italian point of view [Goldini] has always been the Italian Moliere, but he is Moliere without a cutting edge, and without Tartuffe."
• "[Parini is] the most estimable poet of the eighteenth century ."
• "Neither Parini nor Alfieri quite attains the status of a major poet."
• "Vincenzo Monti [] could seem to his contemporaries not only the major poet of their time, but also a new Dante sprung to life, only better than the first one, a Dante ingentilito."

The Trilogy of the Opening Nineteenth Century

• "Recent criticism has claimed [Le Grazie] as the culminating point for Foscolo, and even as the highest point of lyric poetry in the Italian nineteenth century."

From Carducci to D'Annuzio

• "[Giosue Carducci] built his poetry quite largely on a sense of history, and [] stands as the most substantial figure of the second half of the century."
• "with Verga we meet for the first time a novelist whose work stands comparison with Manzoni."
• "With Verga and Carducci we feel the clarity and sanity of vision; with Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863-1938), who derives from both of them, we have passed to the sultry decadence of the fin-de-siecle."
• "[d'Annunzio was] the most gifted, and the most applauded, writer of Italy at the turning of the century."

The End of the Nineteenth Century

• "If it was d'Annunzio who may be thought of as a literary Mussoloni, with the same vulgar triumph and the same downfall, it was another who has been labelled as precursor. This is Alfredo Oriani."
• "But with all his habitual faults Fogazzaro wrote one of the three most significant novels of the Italian nineteenth century."
• "Brought up amidst the prevailing positivism, Pascoli shares in Fogazzaro's reaction towards a spiritualistic idealism. But since the unknown and the unknowable are the substance of his poetry, this tends inevitably towards imprecision of statement and of outline."
• "if there is nowhere a writer of the calibre of Verga, yet there is a flowering of relionalist narrative with a high standard of competancy."

Pirandello and the Question-Mark of the Twentieth Century

• "[Svevo's] merits are of a lower order, and placed opposite Verga it is apparent that the heroic poetry which bathes Verga's Sicily is greater achievement than this bourgeois atmosphere of Trieste."