Italian Chimeras: Narrating Italy Through the Writing of Sebastiano Vassalli

ISBN-13: 9781789977028 / Angielski / Miękka / 2020 / 328 str.

Meriel Tulante

Opis

Sebastiano Vassalli (1941-2015) engaged in an ambitious project to narrate Italy, the nation, its people and its pathologies. For Vassalli, chimeras are the myths that have repeatedly ensnared the nation, resulting in the social and political dysfunctions he denounces. This book represents the first study of Vassalli's works as a whole.

Recenzje

«The first full presentation and critical assessment in English of one of Italy's most original and thought-provoking writers of the past fifty years. The book convincingly shows how Vassalli's characters and milieus are distinctly Italian, and yet speak the universal language of desire frustrated and crushed, in different historical settings, by the brutality of institutions and power.» (Lino Pertile, Research Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University)

«This sweeping study of Sebastiano Vassalli, one of European literature's most iconoclastic public intellectuals, is a retrospective of his multifaceted oeuvre and Italy's tumultuous politics and culture from the late 1960s onward. Meriel Tulante's deft and timely analysis brings together literary studies and cultural history to reveal the ethos of his unsparing and polemical lens on human society.» (Letizia Modena, Associate Professor of Italian, Vanderbilt University)

Spis treści

CONTENTS: A Laughing Matter: The Neoavantgarde, the commedia all'italiana, and a Political Trilogy - Impegno Revisited: The Public Intellectual and the Futurists - History as Meaning: The Past in Narrative - The Monster, the Nation, the Self: Marginality and Belonging - Place and Nation: Regional Identities and an Ethics of Place - A «caso» Vassalli.

O autorze

Meriel Tulante is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Thomas Jefferson University.