Passioni boccacciane tra Francia e Italia

La Fontaine e l’abate Casti

Abstract

This paper focuses on the rewriting of some of the Decameron’s novellas both as a literary form, and as narrative patterns, by La Fontaine and Casti – for whose version of Boccaccio the former is an important intertext. La Fontaine and Casti’s rewritings of the Decameron deeply innovate and modify the genre of the Boccaccian tale, as well as often try to actualize it to a language and/or to a thoroughly different period of time, both from a cultural and a literary point of view. Three case studies are taken into consideration in order to show, in particular, how the two authors transpose some of the metaphors and images of passion used in the Decameron. The case studies chosen are important because they are aimed at proposing models of behavior which are very different from those contained in the hypotext.