The Decameron Third Day in Perspective

"This volume is a useful contribution to Boccaccio studies, with essays that not only review and comment on previous scholarship but trace connections between that tale and others in the Decameron, often looking as well to outside intertextual references." -- Janet Smarr, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of California, San Diego "The contributors to The 'Decameron' Third Day in Perspective have delivered a set of essays whose sum is often greater than their individual parts. Many of the chapters highlight themes that turn out to course through the day - speech vs. silence, games of deception, appearance vs. reality - and in this way they offer readers not just a sense of Boccaccio's compositional practice but also a clear notion of the narrative and thematic threads that unify the third day." -- Michael Sherberg, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Washington University in St Louis

The second of the University of Toronto Press’s interpretive guides to Boccaccio’s Decameron, this collection forms part of an ambitious project to examine the entire Decameron, Day by Day.

Divided into ten days of ten novellas each, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron is one of the literary gems of the fourteenth century. The ‘Decameron’Third Day in Perspective is an interpretive guide to the stories of the text’s Third Day. For each novella, a distinguished Boccaccio scholar offers an essay that both reviews the current scholarly literature and advances new and intriguing interpretations of the work. The whole collection reflects the series’s guiding principle of examining the text “in perspective,” revealing the connections among the novellas, the Days, and the framing narrative that holds the whole Decameron together.

The second of the University of Toronto Press’s interpretive guides to Boccaccio’s Decameron, this collection forms part of an ambitious project to examine the entire Decameron, Day by Day.