Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) is one of Italy's most canonical and beloved poets. In Beyond the Family Romance, Maria Truglio offers fresh insight into the uncanny qualities of Pascoli's domestic verse. As suggested by the Freudian title, this study opens a dialogue between Pascoli's literature and Freud's theories, with a particular focus on each author's interrogation of origins. Through close readings and historical contextualization, themes of regression, memory, and other manifestations of 'origins' are analyzed, moving Pascoli's poetry beyond the biographical strictures that...

This book bridges the fields of Children s Literature and Italian Studies by examining how turn-of-the-century children s books forged a unified national identity for the new Italian State. Through contextualized close readings of a wide range of texts, Truglio shows how the 19th-century concept of recapitulation, which held that ontogeny (the individual s development) repeats phylogeny (the evolution of the species), underlies the strategies of this corpus. Italian fairy tales, novels, poems, and short stories imply that the personal development of the child corresponds to and hence...

This interdisciplinary volume interrogates bodily thinking in avant-garde texts from Spain and Italy during the early twentieth century and their relevance to larger modernist preoccupations with corporeality. It examines the innovative ways Spanish and Italian avant-gardists explored the body as a locus for various aesthetic and sociopolitical considerations and practices. In reimagining the nexus points where the embodied self and world intersect, the texts surveyed in this book not only shed light on issues such as authority, desire, fetishism, gender, patriarchy, politics, religion,...