Francesco Petrarca: a work, a novel

Abstract

This article aims to propose the need to approach Francesco Petrarca's Opera Omnia as a single text, fragmented into different individual works. I will demonstrate that its unity is not in extratextual, historical or biographical elements, but in the same poetic form, since the coherence that governs the structure is above all artistic. Moreover, such a form has to be read and considered as a novel. To define this text and justify the proposed choice, I will resort to the teaching of some renowned theorists and critics of contemporary literature because it is the poet himself who allows to refer to his work from an ever-new present. If it is true that Petrarca is a classical author, since he places himself in that rhetorical and poetic tradition, from there he addresses not only his contemporaries, but also ad posteros, which makes it possible to consider him ancient as well as contemporary, and as such it is possible to analyze him. In addition, if it is true that a classic is an author whose work never finishes saying what it has to say, the passage of time cannot be a penalty, but a resource with which his word lives in a constant present and that is why it is possible to read under a current hermeneutic lens.