Giacomo Leopardi, Italy's great poet of the Romantic age, is the author of some of the most beautiful and best-loved poems in the Italian language and some of the most remarkable letters in European literature. The interest of the letters is both biographical and literary: they document the background -- the difficult personal circumstances, the intense and troubled family relationships, the contacts and friendships with other writers -- against which a haunting and compelling poetic voice came to maturity. The letters, not previously available in English except fragmentarily, are here...

Since the early 1980s, the novel has been deemed by many Italian women writers to be the most apt vehicle for creating positive images of the future of women. The novel becomes the space for confession, while at the same time allowing greater expressive freedom. Narrative levels become mirrors, narrator and character are immersed in the same past, a sort of double memory is formulated. In this game of 'speculations', the search for an individual identity (truth) is also taken into account, namely, the creation of an identity through a 'double subjectivity'. There is no longer one voice for...

With the Tangentopoli corruption scandals of the early 1990s, Italy is purported recently to have experienced a period of political change comparable to the period immediately following World War II. This latter being the socio-political environment in which the concept of impegno - political commitment - in literature became current, this volume asks whether an equivalent moment of constitutional crisis in the 1990s has had a comparable impact on perceptions of the role of the writer and of literature in Italian society.
The volume traces the development of impegno in post-war Italian...

In the second half of the twentieth century, the Italian historical novel provided an unrivalled number of best sellers and publishing 'phenomena'. The success of the genre is closely related to a more general interest in revisiting the past in the light of a changed understanding of the nature, or philosophy, of history. This study aims to explore the particularly marked increase in the production and popularity of the historical novel in the period between the mid-1960s and the early 1990s, with reference to current debates on the nature of history. It presents a theoretical framework which...