Identità sociale e generi letterari. Nascita e morte del sodalizio stilnovista

Abstract

The article considers the literary production of Dante Alighieri – and, in parallel, of his “first friend” Guido Cavalcanti – between the composition of the Vita nuova and Dante’s exile. It aims to show that the conflict between Dante and Cavalcanti can also be situated on the level of the representation that the two poets give of themselves in their work, through their chosen poetics and literary genres. Despite having the reputation of a philosophus, the magnate Guido shows his aristocratic disdain even in literary options: he depicts himself as a knight-poet and focuses solely on the representation and analysis of the phenomenology of love. On the contrary, from the Vita nuova on, Dante does not present himself to his audience as only an exquisite and aristocratic love poet, but also – and explicitly – as an expert in physiology, philosophy, and rhetoric. On the model of Guittone d’Arezzo and Brunetto Latini, when he enters Florentine political life, he attributes a civic and ethical function to his poetry, which definitively breaks with the “stilnovistic” poetics of his juvenile association with Cavalcanti.