著者

米山 喜晟

出版者

桃山学院大学

雑誌

国際文化論集 (ISSN:09170219)

巻号頁・発行日

no.37, pp.141-192, 2007-12-10

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As I showed in my previous three papers, though the Novellino had been an excellent forerunner of the Italian novellas, only with the appearance of the Decameron was the basis for the Italian novella truly founded. Almost all the elements of the novella can be considered as heritages of the Decameron but, referring to the definitions of the novella form, I selected firstly the adoption of the `cornice' or framework device, secondly the setting within the realm of the believable, and thirdly the audacious expression of Eros and of sexual relations. In this paper I focus on the Pecorone of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, the Trecentonovelle of Franco Sacchetti, and the Novelliere of Giovanni Sercambi, all of which were included by Di Francia in his Novellistica as epigones of Boccaccio. I find that these three works imitated Boccaccio's cornice device to various extents. I also find a remarkable increase of settings within the realm of the believable by the three authors compared to works published before the Decameron, and a similar increase in the percentage of novellas in which sexual relations take place. From the high number of incidences in the Novelliere, in particular (49.68%), we can imagine how the people of Tuscany, where the tradition of Dante and Petrarch had forbidden them to see women in sexual terms, must have welcomed the appearance of the Decameron as the liberator of Eros.