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Abstract

Landscapes of Exile examines the phenomenon of exile in Renaissance Italy using an integrated approach that analyzes the spatial practices and their effects on the literary production of six Renaissance writers who were uprooted from their country, city, and/or community of origin. The authors in this study, namely Francesco Petrarca, Biondo Flavio, Leon Battista Alberti, Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, Ippolita Maria Sforza, and Niccolò Machiavelli, embody a representative range of the different typologies of exile that existed in the Renaissance and make for a particularly illuminating case of the multifaceted (political, hereditary, marital etc.) reasons that engendered them. This dissertation represents the first critical attempt to situate the study of exile in Renaissance Italy within the scholarly discourse surrounding mobility in the early modern period. In doing so, it does not only acknowledge exile as an agent behind the mobility of early modern people, but it also accounts for how this idiosyncratic mode of experiencing movement (or lack thereof) prompted writers to develop ways to translate and respond to their physical and emotional dislocation in literary form that are directly informed by this experience. Specifically, this dissertation explores how the spatial, social, and gendered perspectives from which Renaissance exiles looked at and read the world affected the form, approach, and content of their literary production and how their writing responded to the experience of displacement on three main levels, each of which corresponds to one of the three chapters of this dissertation: epistolary, methodological, and narrative. Through a close-up analysis of the relation between these authors’ literary corpuses and the shifting geographies in which their writing took place, this dissertation recasts exile as not only a legal and social condition, but a creative position from which to write that has a profound impact on the development of one’s literary identity and voice.

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