The Petrarchan Sestina

FAIN: FB-12240-74

Marianne Shapiro
New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)

To study and complete a monograph on the Petrarchan sestina, planned as an anaylsis of the form and a survey of its history; to discover and identify metamorphoses in the rhyme-function and semantic import of the key words; to demonstrate through a study of Petrarch's nine sestinas, as well as those of Arnaut Daniel and Giuseppe Ungaretti, the principle of the existence of a nonarbitrary, functional relationship between the form of a literary text and its meaning.