The Triumph of Exile: The Ruptures and Transformations of Exile in Petrarch

Abstract

Abstract Petrarch's preoccupation with exile is not only extraordinarily passionate; it is also untimely and original. His intellectual and poetic praxis is accompanied by an obsession with exile,1 whose intensity and transformations offer him a hitherto unseen freedom, enabling him to create his own self as his own artwork. He orchestrates an all-embracing exile whose ruptures and upheavals secure him an indeterminacy and potentiality out of which he is free to stage himself independently: Exile becomes a strategy with which he endeavors to achieve the possibility of being his own creator or author.2