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,...
Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Post-war Italy examines how the artists and intellectuals of post-war Italy dealt with the...
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...
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...
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,...
From the mysterious glosses by 'EK' in the poetry of Edmund Spenser, to the self-commentary in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, readers of lite...
Italian is unique among modern European languages, for although it has a history going back eight centuries, it has only consolidated as a spoken national language during the twentieth century. Previously, it was a written, literary language, and people spoke regional dialects that were strikingly different from each other. This has intriguing implications for understanding notions such as mother tongue, native speaker, and literary language, and Giulio Lepschy discusses these and other issues in this collection of six scholarly essays on the Italian language.
Lepschy also explores a...
Italian is unique among modern European languages, for although it has a history going back eight centuries, it has only consolidated as a spoken n...
The nineteenth century represents a crucial historical and cultural phase in the development of modern Italy. Writing to Delight provides a selection of short stories written by some of the most accomplished and acclaimed female authors of nineteenth-century Italy, made available to an English-speaking audience for the first time through this translation. The stories that make up this anthology are written in a realistic vein and describe the life and concerns of women at a time when Italy was going through major social and economic changes. Imbued with didactic aims, the authors...
The nineteenth century represents a crucial historical and cultural phase in the development of modern Italy. Writing to Delight provides ...
The ugly woman is a surprisingly common figure in Italian poetry, one that has been frequently appropriated by male poetic imagination to depict moral, aesthetic, social, and racial boundaries. Mostly used between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries - from the invectives of Rustico Filippi, Franco Sacchetti, and Burchiello, to the paradoxical praises of Francesco Berni, Niccolo Campani and Pietro Aretino, and further to the conceited encomia of Giambattista Marino and Marinisti - the portrayal of female unattractiveness was, argues Patrizia Bettella in The Ugly Woman, one way...
The ugly woman is a surprisingly common figure in Italian poetry, one that has been frequently appropriated by male poetic imagination to depict mo...
In Lodovico Dolce: Renaissance Man of Letters, Ronnie Terpening revives and reassesses the work of a minor but significant sixteenth-century humanist, said to have led a life 'both wretched and glorious.' Although Dolce (1510? - 1568) gained universal renown in his own century and was considered a cultivated scholar and writer, few today recognize his importance as one of the major transmitters of culture in Cinquecento Italy. This is the first comprehensive study in English of the literary works of Dolce. It integrates a critical rereading of his writings with a history of the...
In Lodovico Dolce: Renaissance Man of Letters, Ronnie Terpening revives and reassesses the work of a minor but significant sixteenth-centu...
The texts of Luigi Pirandello, one of the literary giants of this century, have been subject to widely different readings by successive generations of critics. These essays present an up-to-date re-evaluation of Pirandello's works, which include poetry, novels, short stories, plays, essays, letters, and memoirs.
Arranged in four sections - Introduction, Structures, Meanings, and Innovations - the volume presents a variety of provocative viewpoints and offers an accurate picture of the network of issues inhabiting the author's oeuvre. In the introductory section the editors provide an...
The texts of Luigi Pirandello, one of the literary giants of this century, have been subject to widely different readings by successive generations...
Italy possesses two literary canons, one in the Tuscan language and the other made up of the various dialects of its many regions. The Other Italy presents for the first time an overview of the principal authors and texts of Italy's literary canon in dialect. It highlights the cultivated dialect poetry, drama, and narrative prose since the codification of the Tuscan literary language in the early sixteenth century, when writing in dialect became a deliberate and conscious alternative to the official literary standard.
The book offers a panorama of the literary dialects of Italy over...
Italy possesses two literary canons, one in the Tuscan language and the other made up of the various dialects of its many regions. The Other Italy ...
Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is the best known and most read work in Italian literature next to Dante's Divine Comedy. In the tradition of Lectura Dantis, the practice of story-by-story critical readings of Dante's work, Elissa Weaver has collected essays from some of the most prominent American Boccaccio scholars to provide critical readings of the Decameron Proem, Introduction, and the ten stories that constitute the first of the ten 'days' of storytelling.
The first of the twelve essays opens the volume with a consideration of the Proem, demonstrating...
Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is the best known and most read work in Italian literature next to Dante's Divine Comedy. In the tradi...