Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> European - Italian

Translated here for the first time into English, Sergio Zatti's The Quest for Epic is a selection of studies on the two major poets of the Italian Renaissance, Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, by one of the most important literary critics writing in Italy today. An original and challenging work, The Quest for Epic documents the development of Italian narrative from the chivalric romance at the end of the fifteenth century to the genre of epic in the sixteenth century.

Zatti focuses on Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, written in the early 1500s, and progresses to...

Vengeance of the Victim was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

More profoundly than any documentary record, the collected fiction of Giorgio Bassani--Il Romanzo di Ferrara -- captures a very particular and powerful historical reality: Italian Jewish life under Fascism, especially between the passage of the so-called racial laws in 1938 and the end of World War II. Set primarily in the...

One of twentieth-century Italy's greatest thinkers, Primo Levi (1919-1987) started reflecting on the Holocaust almost immediately after his return home from the year he survived in Auschwitz. Levi's powerful Holocaust testimonials reveal his preoccupation with processes of translation, in the form of both embedded and book-length renderings of texts relevant to Holocaust survival. In Arduous Tasks, Lina N. Insana demonstrates how translation functions as a metaphor for the transmission of Holocaust testimony and broadens the parameters of survivor testimony.

The first book to...

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...

During the Italian Renaissance, dozens of early modern writers published collections of private correspondence, using them as vehicles for self-presentation, self-promotion, social critique, and religious dissent. Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance examines the letter collections of women writers, arguing that these works were a studied performance of pervasive ideas about gender as well as genre, a form of self-fashioning that variously reflected, manipulated, and subverted cultural and literary conventions regarding femininity and...

In 1350, the Italian humanist and poet Francesco Petrarca decided to form a collection of all his correspondence. The letters deal with multifarious topics, switch between narration and instruction, the personal and the general, and are addressed to various of his learned friends and contemporaries. They constitute a treasure trove for the history of ideas.

This is the first complete German-language edition of the famous 24 books of the Epistolae familiares; they have been translated from the Latin by Prof. Berthe Widmer, an acknowledged authority on Petrarch. The...

Giorgio Agamben is one of the most important and controversial figures in continental philosophy and critical theory. Agamben’s work explores the intertwining of law, language, aesthetics and politics, most recently theorizing contemporary political situations through analysis of the ‘war on terror’.

Alex Murray explains Agamben’s key ideas, including:

• an overview of his work from his first publication to the present
• clear analysis of Agamben’s philosophy of language and life
• ethics and ‘witnessing’,...

Focusing on four twentieth-century Italian writers (Guido Morselli, Amelia Rosselli, Cesare Pavese, and Primo Levi), Elizabeth Leake examines their personal correspondence, diaries, and obituaries as well as...

An important locus for English-speaking writers, the region of Tuscany is also well represented in the Italian literary canon. In Tuscan Spaces, Silvia Ross focuses on constructions of Tuscany in twentieth-century Italian literature and juxtaposes them with English prose works by such authors as E.M. Forster and Frances Mayes to expose the complexity of literary representation centred on a single milieu.

Ross uses the works of writers such as Federigo Tozzi, Aldo Palazzeschi, Vasco Pratolini, and Elena Gianini Belotti, to seek out alternative visions of Tuscan space and...