![]() ![]() ![]() But Todorov was willing to bet his bottom ruble that if he could find the underlying rules structuring the stories in The Decameron, then that was probably enough to prove that there are underlying structures and rules that govern all of the stories that make up literature. Since on the surface the 100 mini-stories that make up the book seem totally unrelated, isn't The Decameron kind of like literature as a whole? Literature is also made up of loads and loads of individual stories -millions of 'em, and they all seem to be completely unconnected to one another. The Bulgarian structural literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov thought The Decameron could shed some light on the nature of literary study. ![]() ![]() It's got sex, violence, comedy, despair, lusty priests, hapless travelers, the Italian countryside-everything you'd expect in the 14th-century version of Hollywood. The Decameron is made up of these 100 mini-stories that the young people tell each other over ten nights. To pass the time, the young people tell each other stories. A group of ten young people get together in a big house in the countryside to escape the Black Death, which is killing everyone in Italy (which it periodically did throughout the Middle Ages, to the great benefit of literature all over Europe). In the 14th century, the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a book called The Decameron, which was pretty much the equivalent of a blockbuster action movie but with a Renaissance flair. ![]()
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