Love in a Green Shade: Idyllic Romances Ancient to Modern. Richard F. Hardin
with die "author" and in constructing that "author" as a writer. Proceeding chronologically, Nicol6 de' Rossi's sequences are seen as linking Dante's typological poetry to Petrarch's subjective poetics; and Petrarch's Canzoniere is finally set apart for the high degree of self-conscious control in the arrangement and transmission of its lyrics. Studies of minor authors and minor collections such as this one are much worthwhile, for they are essential in determining at the very least the cultural and literary context of all authors, regardless of their degree of canonicity. It must be stated, however, that the theoretical web ingeniously spun for this book, which claims to redefine an entire tradition, falls short of its promise. For Holmes's analysis ultimately shows how great a gap there is in the construction of an authorial presence between her cycles on one side, and the Vita nova and the Canzoniere on the other. The model proposed here is too reductive — its constitutive elements are also found in other macrotexts not mentioned in this book — to be persuasively seen as foreshadowing the authorship suggested in the Vita nova. The tour conducted around early Provencal and Italian poetry becomes a self-fulfilling crusade, tautological in its outcome and almost declared so in Holmes's own "Conclusion." The Vita nova conveys far more than the perception of a self-contained poetic sequence or the sense that we are in the presence of a controlling author/scribe, as Holmes intends. Here is an authorial "site intersected by a myriad suggestions" — in the definition of Barthes's famous article on the death of the author, listed in the bibliography together witli the other equally famous article by Foucault — suggestions, in fact, deriving from the classical as well as from the new vernacualar literature. And it is above all the weight of the Latin tradition — where the notion of authorship and the status it conferred were well established — that is behind the performative act, unprecedented in vernacular literature, by which the "I" of the story sets itself up as the auctor as well as the scriba from the book of memory. The Vita nova being a text that posits itself as the book that is coming into being, establishes a new mode of authorship, one which, in Foucault's terminology, disperses the subject into a tripartite discursive function. It seems, therefore, that the birth of the author and the self ought not to be perceived in the passage from the orality of the Occitan literature to the written production of the Italians, but rather in the shift from literacy, no matter how compromised by oral transmission, to a high degree of self-referential literariness. RINALDINA RUSSELL City University of New York, Queens College