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Author
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Comment
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valentinaflorence
Unregistered User
(2/15/06 5:17 am)
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postmodern biofictions
Hallo everybody! I'm an Italian post-graduated student and I would really be grateful to you if you could tell me the titles of postmodern rewritings having Italian Renaissance characters as subject. To put it more clearly, I know Michaela Roessner's rewritings ("The Stars Dispose" and "The Stars Compel") whos stories are about the cook of Caterina dei Medici. I really, really would like to find other "biofictions" (=rewritings about historical personae) about Italian Renaissance or, at least, Renaissance. I know there are a lot of rewritings about Romantic and Victorian lives but...as for Renaissance?
I saw you helped masterfully the boy was looking for postmodern fairy tales and I hope you can be as kind as you were with him.
thanks a lot!!!!!!!!!!!
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Writerpatrick
Registered User
(2/15/06 9:21 am)
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Re: postmodern biofictions
I guess the Da Vinci Chronicles wouldn't apply. :)
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aka Greensleeves
Registered User
(2/15/06 12:57 pm)
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Re: postmodern biofictions
English author Miranda Seymour has two wonderful historical fiction novels for this period:
Bride of Sforza, aka Stones of Maggiare, which is about Beatrice d'Este (I apologize for my mangled Italian)
and
Daughter of Darkness, about Lucrezia Borgia
Seymour's books are out of print, so you'll have to rely on libraries or used booksellers (I found mine on ebay).
You might also look at Greg Maguire's Mirror, Mirror, a retelling of "Snow White" that casts Borgia as the wicked stepmother.
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catja1
Registered User
(2/17/06 12:59 am)
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Re: postmodern biofictions
Try George Herman's Carnival of Saints -- it's a hilarious fictionalized narrative of the invention of commedia dell'arte, with lots of cameo appearances from famous figures: Giuliano della Rovere (Pope Julius II), all the Borgias, a mysteriously still-alive Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, and assorted Sforzas, d'Estes, and Gonzagas.
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Terri Windling
Registered User
(2/18/06 2:57 am)
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Re: postmodern biofictions
There are two stories by Jack Dann that are worth looking up: "The Path of Remembrance," published in the magazine Amazing Stories, Issue #588, and "The Glass Casket," published in the adult-fairy-tale-fiction anthology Snow White, Blood Red. Both are set (to quote the author) "in the time of Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, and the poet, philosopher and magus, Pico della Mirandola. An aura of magic and mysticism surrounded Pico della Mirandola, who spent his short but brilliant life searching the caballah and other occult sciences for the meaning of truth and love and beauty."
I also recommend Midori Snyder's award-winning novel The Innamorati. It's set in an imaginary world strongly influenced by Renaissance Italy and Commedia dell'Arte -- and it's wonderful.
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midori snyder
Registered User
(2/20/06 6:25 am)
ezSupporter
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Re: postmodern biofictions
Oh I loved Carnival of Saints! What a wonderful novel.
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pauloppenheimer
Registered User
(2/21/06 3:01 pm)
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Re: postmodern biofictions
Terri, the genuine kabbalistic tradition (if I may use the adjective "genuine" of a tradition kicked off by a pseudepigraphon) is rich in stories that I would regard as folklore. The retellings movement (of which you seem to be the epicenter) has mostly stuck to gentile european folklore, with occasional drawings from the wells of east asian and subsaharan african folklore. If I've missed retellings of folktales from other traditions, I would be grateful if you (or someone else on the list who has more time!) would point me to them. - Paul peoppenheimer.org
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Terri Windling
Registered User
(2/23/06 3:32 am)
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Re: postmodern biofictions
Paul, no, I know of any books devoted to retellings from other traditions -- though if anyone else knows of any, I'd love to read them. Ellen Datlow and I tried to interest the publishers of our fairy tale anthologies in a collection of re-told fairy tales from non-western traditions and the proposal was rejected. The publishers felt that uncomfortable with such a book being edited by two European-American women, particularly if we didn't limit the writers in the book to non-European-American writers.
This is actually a touchy issue in publishing circles these days. I have a friend, an award-winning novelist, who has been unable to sell an absolutely gorgeous Y.A. fantasy novel she wrote a few years ago -- a time-travel novel about a young girl who goes back to slavery times in the American south -- because the novel involves black characters and the author is not black herself.
Though I don't know of any books specifically devoted to non-western fairy tale retellings, for general fantasy tales and magical realism I can recommend Sheree Thomas's various anthologies; and Nalo Hopkinson's Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root, Skin Folk, and Mojo: Conjure Stories. Also Carolyn Dunn's Hozho and Through the Eye of the Deer, two Native American fiction anthologies which mix mythic/magical pieces with realist works.
It would be interesting to read stories inspired by the kabbalistic tradition. I have a friend who is looking at the ways the kabbalistic tradition influenced Italy's Commedia dell'Arte, but he has another novel to finish first before he gets that one off the ground.
Edited by: Terri Windling at: 2/23/06 3:36 am
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pauloppenheimer
Registered User
(2/25/06 5:56 am)
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Re: postmodern biofictions
Terri, Thank you for making time to reply. You are one of my personal heroes. Someday I hope to write the full story of how I have been liberated from profound literalism into the big sky mind of a mythic approach. You were very gentle in your reply. I almost posted an immediate reply to myself saying, "What about Native American traditions?"
That was a particularly silly omission on my part, since I recently re-read your Tucson novel. (By the way, I am in Arizona; I hope to get down to Tucson and meet you and some of the other Endicotters one of these days.) The idiocy you mention on the part of publishers is old hat to me: it's been going on in academic circles for at least two decades. It is very difficult to find teachers for courses in paleo-human anthropology, for instance, because it is very difficult to find Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal persons to staff them. I am sorry, but not surprised, to learn that censorship, bias, prejudice, and stereotyping, flying the beautiful banners of diversity and multiculturalism, have made new conquests outside the ivied halls. If you are willing to take the heat, this might be worth discussing in the Journal of Mythic Arts. Was "Silver or Gold" made a lesser story because Emma Bull drew on traditions possibly not their own? Likewise, Freedom and Necessity was a marvelous read, despite the unfortunate facts that neither Emma Bull is a nineteenth-century German philosopher. [Continue rant ad libitum.] You and several other Endicotters are successful -- not to say famous -- editors. Do you not know sane acquisitions editors at some respectable house? That failing, The Journal of Mythic Arts can provide a welcome home for poetry, fiction, essays, visual arts, and so on drawing on the vast variety of the mythologies, legendaries, etiologies, folk tales, folk beliefs, and so on of the huge, rapidly growing, and incomprehensively diverse family of human persons without regard to the ethnic, religious, national, linguistic, blah blah blah credentials of the authors, composers, artists, translators, and adapters of the tales.
If there is any way at all in which I might be useful in such an enterprise, please contact me directly at paul at peoppenheimer dot org. ---- And to all of you, a heartfelt and grateful "Keep up the good work!".
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valentinaflorence
Registered User
(3/1/06 11:30 am)
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postmodern biofictions
Thank you everybody! You've been very very kind and helpful to me. As you guessed,, Writerpack, the Da Vinci Chronicles do not apply because what I'm looking for is a novel where artists/well-known people of Italian Renaissance are fictionalised, but thank you, however. On the other hand, Catja1, I've already ordered one of the novel of George Herman (I saw he wrote plenty of books about Da Vinci and a dwarf!)hoping that not all the famous figures are cameo appearnces -at least, that shouldn't be the role of Leonardo da Vinci. Thank also to Terri Winding, aka Greensleves, and all the others who wrote to me. I do not think that the Innamorati should apply, because, if I understood properly, there none real historical figuire in the plot (althought, I would like to read it, as your judgment is really positive) but I'm going to check Jack Dann, Miranda Seymour, Greg Maguire and I hope to find what I'm looking for!
for you all: I read "the Passion of Artemisia" by Susan Vreeland, a wonderful book about the life of Artemisia Gentileschi, a famous Renaissance Italian painter who left us terrific paintings and was able to live as an independent woman in a male-centerd Italy...I do not add anything more, except that, if you're involved by that subject and can read in Italian, Anna Banti wrote a book about her many years ago (she was the wife of Roberto Longhi, the most accredited critic of Artemisia ).
I greet you for the moment and, if some other ideas jumps into your mind, write me again!
valentina
p.s. for aka Greensleves
I authorize you to redargue me for my English and make me notice all my mistakes...
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valentinaflorence
Registered User
(3/1/06 12:06 pm)
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Re: postmodern biofictions
I took notice just now Midori Snyder is between us...now I 'm even more curious to read The Innamorati!
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