Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> European - Italian

"I always thought that building] bridges is the best job there is because roads go over bridges, and without roads we'd still be like savages. In short, bridges are like the opposite of borders, and borders are where wars start." --Primo Levi, 'La chiave a stella' (The Wrench)

Primo Levi (1919-1987) was one of Italy's most distinguished writers. A survivor of the Holocaust, his memoirs on the Nazi death camps (If This Is a Man and The Truce) are internationally recognised as among the most powerful and profound testimonies to have come out of the extermination of the European...

Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice is a provocative analysis of the pornographic poetry written in patrician poet Domenico Venier s social circle. While Venier and his salon were renowned for elegant love sonnets featuring unattainable female beloveds, among themselves they wrote and circulated poems in Venetian dialect in which women were prostitutes whose defiled bodies were available to all.

Courtney Quaintance analyses poetry, letters, plays, and verse dialogues to show how male writers established, sustained, and publicized their...

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....

The collection ranges across topics such as eighteenth-century sensibility, nineteenth-century concerns with the transmission of emotions, early twentieth-century cinematic affect, and the contemporary...

The collection ranges across topics such as eighteenth-century sensibility, nineteenth-century concerns with the transmission of emotions, early twentieth-century cinematic affect, and the contemporary...

Eugenio Montale, the Fascist Storm, and the Jewish Sunflower uncovers one of the great hidden sagas of modern literature. During Italy s fascist period, Eugenio Montale winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature and one of the greatest modern poets in any language fell in love with Irma Brandeis, a glamorous and beautiful Dante scholar and an American Jew. While their romance would fall apart, it would have literary repercussions that extended throughout the poet s career: Montale s works abound with secret codes that speak to a lost lover and muse.

This study is the first...

The recent histories of Italy and Somalia are closely linked. Italy colonized Somalia from the end of the 19th century to 1941, and held the territory by UN mandate from 1950 to 1960. Italy is also among the destination countries of the Somali diaspora, which increased in 1991 after civil war. Nonetheless, this colonial and postcolonial cultural encounter has often been neglected. Critically evaluating Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of 'minor literature', as well as drawing on postcolonial literary studies, The Somali Within analyses the processes of linguistic and cultural...

In Courtesy Lost, Kristina M. Olson analyses the literary impact of the social, political, and economic transformations of the fourteenth century through an exploration of Dante s literary and political influence on Boccaccio. The book reveals how Boccaccio rewrote the past through the lens of the Commedia, torn between nostalgia for elite families in decline and the need to promote morality and magnanimity within the Florentine Republic.

By examining the passages in Boccaccio s Decameron, De casibus, and Esposizioni in which the author rewrites...