Divided into ten days of ten novellas each, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is one of the literary gems of the fourteenth century. The 'Decameron' Third Day in Perspective is an interpretive guide to the stories of the text's Third Day. For each novella, a distinguished Boccaccio scholar offers an essay that both reviews the current scholarly literature and advances new and intriguing interpretations of the work. The whole collection reflects the series's guiding principle of examining the text "in perspective," revealing the connections among the novellas, the...

Often hailed as one of the greatest television series of all time, The Sopranos is a product of its time, firmly embedded in the problems of post-industrial, post-ethnic America. In The Sopranos: Born under a Bad Sign, Franco Ricci examines the groundbreaking HBO series and its impact as a cultural phenomenon.

Ricci demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of the series, the genre, and their social context in his analysis of the show's complex themes and characters. He explores The Sopranos' deep engagement with problems of race, class, gender, and identity,...

Between 1948 and the end of the 1950s, Italian and American government agencies and corporations commissioned hundreds of short films for domestic and foreign consumption on topics such as the fight against unemployment, the transformation of rural and urban spaces, and the re-establishment of democratic regimes in Italy and throughout Europe. In Schooling in Modernity, Paola Bonifazio investigates the ways in which these sponsored films promoted a particular vision of modernization and industry and functioned as tools to govern the Italian people.

The author uses extensive...

The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell Arte Stage examines the emergence of the professional actress from the 1560s onwards in Italy. Tracing the historical progress of actresses from their earliest appearances as sideshow attractions to revered divas, Rosalind Kerr explores the ways in which actresses commodified their sexual and cultural appeal.

Newly translated archival material, iconographic evidence, literary texts, and theatrical scripts provide a rich repertoire through which Kerr demonstrates how actresses skillfully improvised roles...

Fictions of Youth is a comprehensive examination of adolescence as an aesthetic, sociological, and ideological category in Pier Paolo Pasolini's prose, poetry, and cinema. Simona Bondavalli's book explores the multiple ways in which youth, real and imagined, shaped Pasolini's poetics and critical positions and shows how Pasolini's works became the basis for representations of contemporary young people, particularly Italians. From Pasolini's own coming of age under Fascism in the 1940s to the consumer capitalism of the 1970s, youth stood for innocence, vitality, and rebellion....

Enlightening Encounters traces the impact of photography on Italian literature from the medium's invention in 1839 to the present day. Investigating the ways in which Italian literature has responded to photographic practice and aesthetics, the contributors use a wide range of theoretical perspectives to examine a variety of canonical and non-canonical authors and a broad selection of literary genres, including fiction, autobiography, photo-texts, and migration literature. The first collection in English to focus on photography's reciprocal relationship to Italian literature,...

Every year, Italy swells with millions of tourists who infuse the economy with billions of dollars and almost outnumber Italians themselves. In fact, Italy has been a model tourist destination for longer than it has been a modern state. The Beautiful Country explores the enduring popularity of "destination Italy," and its role in the development of the global mass tourism industry. Stephanie Malia Hom tracks the evolution of this particular touristic imaginary through texts, practices, and spaces, beginning with the guidebooks that frame Italy as an idealized land of leisure and...

Femininity in the form of the donna-crisi, or crisis-woman, was a fixture of fascist propaganda in the early 1930s. A uniquely Italian representation of the modern woman, she was cosmopolitan, dangerously thin, and childless, the antithesis of the fascist feminine ideal the flashpoint for a range of anxieties that included everything from the changing social roles of urban women to the slippage of stable racial boundaries between the Italian nation and its colonies.

Using a rich assortment of scientific, medical, and popular literature, Natasha V. Chang s The...

In the ancient world, friendship was a virtue of great philosophical importance. Aristotle wrote extensively about it, as did Cicero. Their conception of friendship as a relationship based on reason and virtue was transformed by Christianity into a connection based on the mutual love of an individual and God.

In Dante's Idea of Friendship, Filippa Modesto offers sharp readings of the Commedia, Vita Nuova, and Convivio that demonstrate Dante's interest in that theme. Drawing on a lucid and wide-ranging examination of the literature on friendship,...

The year 1932, the tenth anniversary of Mussolini's March on Rome, was fascism's Decennale. Commemorating Italian fascism's seizure of power, the Decennale was celebrated by the regime in a deliberate attempt to radicalize the original movement and develop it into an imperial and racist regime.

In Mussolini's Decennale, Antonio Morena explores a cross-section of Italian culture during the Decennale. Studying literature, speeches, documentaries, films, textbooks, and the 1932 Exhibition, he discusses how the regime, its patrons, and even its critics...