Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> European - Italian

Between 1550 and 1650, Europe was swept by a fascination with wondrous accounts of monsters and other marvels - of valiant men slaying dragons, women giving birth to animals, young girls growing penises, and all manner of fantastic phenomena. Known as 'fairy tales, ' these stories had many guises and inhabited a variety of literary texts. The first two collections of such fairy tales published on the continent, Giovan Francesco Straparola's Le piacevoli notti and Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti, were greeted with much enthusiasm at home and abroad and...

A Multitude of Women looks at the ways in which both Italian literary tradition and external influences have assisted Italian women writers in rethinking the theoretical and aesthetic ties between author, text, and readership in the construction of the novel. Stefania Lucamante discusses the valuable contributions that Italian women writers have made to the contemporary novel and illustrates the relevance of the novelistic examples set by their predecessors. She addresses various discursive communities, reading works by Di Lascia, Ferrante, Vinci, and others with reference to...

Grazia Deledda (1871-1936) was the author of many influential novels and remains one of the most significant Italian women writers of her time. However, critics tend to pigeonhole her works into convenient literary categories and to ignore the uniqueness of her style and voice. Grazia Deledda's Dance of Modernity offers a timely and thought-provoking interpretation of this Nobel laureate, examining her work in the context of European philosophical and literary modernity.

Margherita Heyer-Caput takes a philosophical and philological approach in order to provide a reassessment of...

The first of its kind in English, Mafia and Outlaw Stories from Italian Life and Literature is a selection of readings from Italian fiction and non-fiction writers on the subject of the Mafia. Among the renowned writers featured are Giovanni Verga, Grazia Deledda, Anna Maria Ortese, Livia De Stefani, and Silvana La Spina, as well as famous witnesses such as Felicia Impastato, Letizia Battaglia, and Rita Atria who provide personal, often terrifying testimonies about their experiences with the Mafia. It is a historically diverse examination of criminal and outlaw institutions by...

Recent years have witnessed a marked increase in scholarly interest in Valerius Flaccus's Argonautica. Numerous analyses, discussions and commentaries on the poetical art of this "difficult" epic have appeared. This volume provides a philological commentary on the first book of the Argonautica. Special attention is paid to the sources upon which Valerius drew, and a comparison made with earlier literary tradition (in particular with the first book of Vergil's Aeneid, but also with Seneca's tragedies). In addition, the language, style and compositional techniques...

Im vorliegenden Band werden Petronius' Satyrica in 22 deutschen und italienischen Beitragen von Althistorikern, klassischen Philologen, Archaologen und Wissenschaftshistorikern unter folgenden Gesichtspunkten untersucht: Historischer und kultureller Kontext / Rhetorik und Linguistik / Narrativik / Kunst / Rezeption. Damit wird ein aktuelles Panorama der gegenwartigen facettenreichen Petron-Forschung geboten.
In der letzten Rubrik werden unter anderem Nachwirkungen der beruhmten Novelle der Witwe von Ephesos in den Blick genommen sowie eine kritische Edition und eine...

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) experimented with such a wide variety of genres that critics have tended to focus more on the differences among his works than on their underlying similarities. However, a more comprehensive examination of his corpus reveals that concealed beneath this striking diversity of subject and genre there is a coherent mythology, a virtual catalogue of innovative myths designed to more accurately reflect his cultural experience and better address the needs of his age.

Exploring the most significant of these myths, Boccaccio's Naked Muse presents a...

The curiosity with which Europeans approached the New World was reflected in the writings of Italian historians, missionaries, travelers, and explorers, who described with fascination the customs of the peoples they encountered in their travels. In this study Stefania Buccini examines the representation of the Americas in Italian literature during the Age of the Enlightenment.

She begins by analyzing the motivations and circumstances behind the emergence of the myth of the "noble savage." Eighteenth-century Italy had a strong orientation toward the more "advanced" American societies...

Founded by F.T. Marinetti in 1909, Italian Futurism was the first major avant-garde movement of the twentieth century. It was also one of the longest lasting, having continued as long as Marinetti and his colleagues remained active - until 1944. Despite the provocative manifestos and outrageous public performances that earned its members international fame, their remarkable poetic achievements have received little post-war scholarly attention. This anthology, by the widely recognized Italian Futurist scholar Willard Bohn, seeks to correct this oversight.

It is commonly believed that...

The mobility of women is a central issue in feminist analysis of literary works and historical periods. Rewriting the Journey in Contemporary Italian Literature explores the concept of the journey from feminist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial perspectives, in order to offer an alternative understanding of "moving." Cinzia Sartini Blum examines the new literature of migration in Italian and journeys in the works of Biancamaria Frabotta, Dacia Maraini, Toni Maraini, and Maria Pace Ottieri, to demonstrate that women writers and migrant authors in contemporary Italy present journeys...

Dante Alighieri s Divine Comedy has, despite its enormous popularity and importance, often stymied readers with its multitudinous characters, references, and themes. But until the publication in 2007 of Guy Raffa s guide to the Inferno, students lacked a suitable resource to help them navigate Dante s underworld. With this new guide to the entire Divine Comedy, Raffa provides readers experts in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Dante neophytes, and everyone in between with a map of the entire poem, from the lowest circle of Hell to the highest sphere of...