The absence of grace

Harry Berger

A study of male fantasy, representation anxiety, and narratorial authority in two sixteenth-century books, Baldassare Castiglione's Libro del Cortegiano (1528) and Giovanni Della Casa's Il Galateo (1558). The book focuses on the way the Libro del Cortegiano and Il Galateo cope with and represent the interaction between changes of elite culture and the changing construction of masculine identity in early modern Europe. More specifically, it connects questions of male fantasy and masculine identity to questions about the authority and reliability of narrators, and shows how these questions surface in narratorial attitudes toward socioeconomic rank or class, political power, and gender.