On the Threshold of Poems: a Paratextual Approach to the Narrative/Lyric Opposition in Italian Renaissance Poetry

This contribution focuses on the presence and function of prose rubrics in fifteenth and sixteenth-century lyric collections. On the one hand, this understudied paratextual component can be analysed as a specific form of self-commentary; on the other, it offers a privileged perspective on the relationship between the narrative and the lyric in early modern poetry. The chapter is arranged into three sections, each moving from a pivotal book in the Italian lyric tradition (Dante’s Vita Nova, Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, and Pietro Bembo’s famous 1501 edition of the latter work), and combines a historical-genealogical approach with a number of theoretical questions raised by the interaction of prose captions and verse in a lyric and self-exegetical context. Throughout the chapter, the issue of lyric ‘narrativity’ is examined both at the level of individual texts and at the macrotextual level.