![]() His feeling of love is at first a self-centred need, as in the courtly tradition, for his devotion to be rewarded, but then evolves into detached praise for his beloved as the only kind of reward needed to satisfy his desire. The story, however, is based not so much on external events but relates the protagonist’s spiritual renewal. ![]() In highly idealized and almost hagiographic terms, the narrative traces the story of Dante’s love for Beatrice, whose portrayal is highly bound up with the imagery of Christ. ![]() Structurally, the work is arranged as a diachronic prosimetron, an alternation of prose and poetry (although it seems highly likely that some of the poems were written at the time of the commentary itself), the first of its kind in Italian literature, modelled on Boethius' De consolatione Philosophiae, ascribed in Medieval times to the elegiac genre, to which, as has recently been suggested, Vita Nuova could also belong. The author presents it as an anthology of his early poems, framed within a prose commentary which not only guarantees narrative structure and progression, explaining and revealing the circumstances which inspired the poems, but also functions as a detailed commentary on the 31 poems selected. Written between 12, the Vita Nuova is dedicated to Dante’s “first friend”, his primo amico, Guido Cavalcanti. Home Page > Textual pathway > Works in the vernacular > The Vita Nuova: structure and content Pathways through Literature - Italian writers - Dante Alighieri ![]()
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