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This book studies in detail the complexities of these conflicting aspects of Petrarchism as they are boldly juxtaposed in moments of recantation, or palinode. Manipulations of recantatory gestures in the poems of Petrarch, Gaspara Stampa, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser are especially succinct points of focus for considerations of these authors' more general relationships to and revisions of both Petrarchism and the cultural climates in which they wrote. Because they involve questions of confessions and autobiography, ethics and aesthetics, the concerns of the palinode are aligned with those of the Petrarchan lyric, and also engage larger cultural discourses surrounding the lyric poem that would demand recantation. Given the recantation's role of mediating between the poetic work and the world beyond, critical categories such as "monologic" and "dialogic," derived from the works of M. M Bakhtin, are suitable tools for an examination of the Petrarchan lyric and its recantation, while at the same time, the nature and value of these critical concepts are interrogated Because both classical and medieval recantatory traditions inform the Petrarchans' usages of the genre, special focus is placed upon the originary Greek recantation, Stesichorus of Himera's palinode to his Helen, and its recovery in the Renaissance (within the context of Plato's "youthful" poetic work, the Phaedrus). Stesichorus's palinode is particularly revealing when viewed in relation to Renaissance Petrarchism because of its association of the discursive and formal dualities inherent in the genre with its female addressee, Helen. Helen's resurrections in the Petrarchan ladies (and writers) of the later period provide rich variations on Stesichorus's ventriloquistic recantation and its treatment of gender relationships. Like the palinode itself, its emblematic figure, Helen, mediates between the poet's self-expression, the literary tradition in which he or she works, and voices of culture in the world beyond
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