Contemporary Italian Filmmaking is an innovative critique of Italian filmmaking in the aftermath of World War II - as it moves beyond traditional categories such as genre film and auteur cinema. Manuela Gieri demonstrates that Luigi Pirandello's revolutionary concept of humour was integral to the development of a counter-tradition in Italian filmmaking that she defines humoristic'. She delineates a Pirandellian genealogy' in Italian cinema, literature, and culture through her examination of the works of Federico Fellini, Ettore Scola, and many directors of the new generation, ' such as...

Federico Fellini remains the best known of the postwar Italian directors. This collection of essays brings Fellini criticism up to date, employing a range of recent critical filters, including semiotic, psychoanalytical, feminist and deconstructionist. Accordingly, a number of important themes arise - the reception of fascism, the crisis of the subject, the question of agency, homo-eroticism, feminism, and constructions of gender.

Since the early 1970s, a slide in critical and theoretical attention to Fellini's work has corresponded with an assumption that his films are...

This volume is part of the Index Emblematicus series, a project whose aim is to collect and edit important works of emblem literature produced throughout Europe during the Renaissance.

Volume 2 of the English Emblem Tradition provides extensive critical apparatus for four late sixteenth-century English works: P.S., The Heroicall Devises of M. Claudius Paradin and] The Purtratures or Emblemes of Gabriel Simeon, A Florentine; Andrew Willet, Sacrorum Emblematum Centuria Una; and Thomas Combe, The Theater of Fine Devices. The volume not only reproduces each of these emblem books, but...

Ricci's book ranges widely over Calvino's oeuvre to illustrate the accuracy of the idea articulated by Calvino himself that a visual image lies at the origin of all his narrative. The book's main theme is the difficult interface between word and image that Calvino struggled with throughout his career, the act of perception that rendered visible that which was invisible and transformed what was seen into what is read. Ricci holds that Calvino's narrative has an 'imagocentric' program and that his literary strategy is 'ekphrastic' i.e. it is characterized by literary description of visual...

In this ground-breaking work, Ellen Nerenberg offers an analysis of the confinement experience in Italian narrative between 1930 and 1960, the last fifteen years of Fascism and the fifteen that followed. Nerenberg diverges from the notion that a radical break from Fascism coincided with Mussolini's fall, instead revealing a disturbing continuity of social restraints following World War II.

Drawing on critical discourses of architectural design, urban planning, and cultural geography, Nerenberg offers readings of Buzzati, Piovene, de Cespedes, Banti, Morante, Pratolini, and Gadda....

Of the many treatises written in Italy during the Counter-Reformation, none is more illustrative of the intellectual fermentation of the period than Comanini's work on the purpose of painting, Il Figino overo del fine della Pittura (1591). Although the importance of Il Figino has long been recognized, the text has remained largely inaccessible to many scholars throughout the world. This first complete English translation will make the work available to those readers for the first time.

In Il Figino, Comanini addresses all of the most hotly debated aesthetic issues of the time,...

Guido Cavalcanti (d. 1300) is one of the greatest Italian poets of all time. His legacy consists of some fifty poems, of which his canzone on the nature of love, Donna me prega (A lady asks me) is the most famously difficult and complex. The poem is important not only because it sheds light on fundamental intellectual debates during the time of Dante, but also because of its influence on generations of poets and philosophers. In this study, Maria Luisa Ardizzone sets Donna me prega in an entirely new light - first, by examining its role in Cavalcanti's poetic practice,...

Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Post-war Italy examines how the artists and intellectuals of post-war Italy dealt with the 'shameful' heritage of their fascist upbringing and education by trying to craft a new cultural identity for themselves and the country. The continuities between the culture of the fascist and post-fascist periods were, however, far greater than what intellectuals were ready to admit, creating an uncomfortable, sometimes schizophrenic relation to time, as a painful urge to erase the past.

Drawing on a variety of critical approaches,...

The writings of Italo Svevo (1861-1928), who was a pioneer of the modernist novel in Italy, are being revived in both Italian and English. Giuliana Minghelli's In the Shadow of the Mammoth uses Svevo's parodic Darwinian fable of the prehistoric encounter between the weak and 'unfinished' man and an incommensurable other to reassess his eccentric contribution to 20th century literature in works like As a Man Grows Older and Confessions of Zeno. Svevo's fiction displaces the heroic strain in Modernism, revealing the self-construction of the subject as an ongoing symbiosis with...

From the mysterious glosses by 'EK' in the poetry of Edmund Spenser, to the self-commentary in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, readers of literature have been fascinated by the comments, addenda, and footnotes added by authors to their own work. In this insightful and original work, Sherry Roush investigates poets' motivations for writing glosses. She argues that self-commentary differs fundamentally from standard commentary, and that it does not necessarily impose an authoritative reading, determine the poem's significance, or furnish factual autobiographical information. Rather,...