Research Interests for Martin Eisner

Professor Eisner completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Italian at Columbia University in 2005 with a dissertation entitled "Bocccaccio Between Dante and Petrarch: The Chigiano Codex, the Terza Rima Trilogy, and the Shaping of Literary History," which addressed the relations among the "tre corone" as expressed in Boccaccio�s vernacular manuscript production. His current book project, "The Afterlife of Dante�s 'Vita Nuova': Textual Incarnations of Dante�s First Book," continues to integrate philological materials into literary criticism, but takes a diachronic rather than synchronic approach in its analysis of the material tradition of Dante�s first book, from its earliest manuscripts to the most recent editions and translations. In addition to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, his other research interests include medieval lyric poety, the European novella tradition, material philology/textual theory, and medieval mysticism.

Keywords:

Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Medieval, Lyric, Poetry, Textual Theory, Philology, Mysticism, novella, canzoniere, Decameron, Commedia, Divine Comedy

Current projects:

philology

textual theory

editorial theory

Dante

Vita nuova

canzoniere

Bocccaccio

Areas of Interest:

Dante
Boccaccio
Petrarch
Medieval
Lyric
Poetry
Textual Theory
Philology
Mysticism
novella
canzoniere
Decameron
Commedia
Divine Comedy

Representative Publications

1. Eisner, M, In the labyrinth of the library: Petrarch's Cicero, Dante's Virgil, and the historiography of the Renaissance, Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 67 no. 3 (September, 2014), pp. 755-790, Cambridge University Press (CUP), ISSN 0034-4338 [repository], [doi] [abs]
2. Eisner, MG, The Word Made Flesh in Inferno 5: Francesca Reading and the Figure of the Annunciation in Dante’s Commedia (2013) [repository]
3. Eisner, MG, Boccaccio e l’invenzione della letteratura italiana, vol. 1 (2014), pp. 11-26 [repository]
4. Eisner, M, The Tale of Ferondo’s Purgatory (III.8), in The Decameron: Third Day, edited by Forni, PM; Ciabattoni, F (2014), pp. 153-173, University of Toronto Press, ISBN 9781442616448
5. Eisner, MG, Eroticizing Theology in Day Three and the Poetics of the Decameron, vol. 31 (2013), pp. 207-224 [repository] [abs]
6. Eisner, MG, The Return to Philology and the Future of Literary Criticism: Reading the Temporality of Literature in Auerbach, Benjamin, and Dante (December, 2011) [4gq644zp]
7. Eisner, M; Schachter, M, Libido Sciendi: Apuleius, Boccaccio and the History of Sexuality, PMLA, vol. 124 no. 3 (May, 2009), pp. 817-837, Modern Language Association (MLA) [doi] [abs]