Contesto generale La novella di Cisti il fornaio è la seconda della sesta giornata del Decameron di Boccaccio. In questa giornata, tutte le novelle hanno un tema comune: il modo elegante e intelligente (con arte e garbo) con cui i personaggi riescono a rispondere a situazioni difficili, spesso grazie all’arguzia, alla prontezza di spirito o all’uso sapiente delle parole (i cosiddetti “motti”). La narratrice è Pampinea, una delle sette giovani protagoniste del Decameron, che introduce la novella con una riflessione: a volte la natura e la fortuna premiano persone di umili origini, dotandole di un'anima nobile e virtuosa, proprio come accade a Cisti. Trama in breve Cisti è un fornaio fiorentino, quindi un uomo del popolo, ma di grande eleganza, educazione e intelligenza. Egli possiede un ottimo vino bianco, che desidera offrire a Geri Spina, un nobile fiorentino che ogni giorno passa davanti alla sua bottega insieme agli ambasciatori di papa Bonifacio VIII. Cisti però sa che, ...

The late Victorian novel was influenced by Darwin's theories of the influence of the natural environment on animals, and by Realism, a new literary and cultural movement, which analyzed the influence of the social environment on man.
Realism was a reaction against the Victorian ideology because of its predilection for poor and degraded social settings and failed characters.
In this period horror and crime novels were written and the best writer of this genre was Robert Louis Stevenson with his masterpiece The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
This novel could be read on two levels:
- as an horror story which owes something to the Gothic novel and Edgar Allan Poe's tales;
- as a meditation on human nature and progress.
Another anti-Victorian writer was Thomas Hardy, who wrote a collection of works called Novels of Character and Environment, the two elements that, he thought, shaped man's destiny.
In contrast with Victorian optimism based on progress, Thomas Hardy adopted the notion of an ïmmanent will", a universal power indifferent to the fate of man.
As the century went on, other novelists followed the general anti-Victorian trend.
This culminated in the disengagement of the Aesthetic Movement with its belief in "Art for Art's sake" - that is, total detachment from social or moral issues.
Fluorished in Europe during the last part of the 19th century, Aestheticism derived from the french writer Théophile Gautier's theory, summed up in his slogan "L'Art pour l'Art".
According to french writer, art is good in it own right, an end in itself.
The leader of this cultural movement is Oscar Wilde and his masterpiece The picture of Dorian Gray.
The philosophy of this novel is the cult of beautiful things and a proclaimed indifference to moral and social issues.
Commenti
Posta un commento