About the author:
Yulia S. Patronnikova, PhD in Philosophy, Senior Researcher, А.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 а, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
E-mail:
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1669-1411
Abstract:
The article looks at the critical analysis of the 17th-century literature carried out by Francesco Fulvio Frugoni in his life’s main opus, “Il Cane di Diogene” (“The Dog of Diogenes”, 1687–1689) — or, more, precisely, in its most famous, tenth novel “Il Tribunal della Critica” (“The Tribunal of Criticism”). The critical evaluation of the authors and their works has an allegorical form of the tribunal of the Criticism over the books. It takes place in Apollo’s temple on Mount Parnassus, where the opus’s main hero — dog Saetta owned by the Cynic philosopher Diogenes — arrives to after a long period of wandering. The tribunal evaluates typologically different works, for the most part, written in Roman languages in the first half of 17th century — presumably the author shares the knowledge he acquired while studying and travelling. A number of famous figures of Seicento are thus left out of consideration. The key criterion used in the evaluation of a text is the ratio of the pleasant and the useful in it. The pleasant refers to a text’s being written in a flamboyant style and the useful — to its containing a certain message or idea. For all the shortcomings of the baroque authors, Frugoni takes his age to be exemplary. Despite its incompleteness and partiality, Frugoni’s analysis is an important source of information about Seicento literature, as well as Seicento theory of literature. In addition, being an analysis of literary texts, it contributes to the development of the history of literature as a self-standing discipline.