Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> European - Italian

Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi (1698--1782) was an Italian poet and librettist, considered the most important writer of opera seria libretti. In this volume, Pietro Metastasio presents new translations of Dido Abandoned, Demetrius, and The Olympiad that stay close to the original form and wording. Featuring an introduction that highlights the playwright's life and significant innovations in dramatic technique as well as a short bibliography, Fucilla's translations will be of interest not only to literary scholars, but also to those concerned with the history of...

In this first detailed and comprehensive account of Leopardi's theory of poetry, G. Singh assesses both the literary and critical attainments of a poet whose eminence ranks him with Dante and Petrarch. Singh's analysis, which employs extensive reference to Leopardi's work in order to illustrate the author's own comments, sets forth Leopardi's views on the larger questions of tradition, inspiration, and the imagination in poetry. Later chapters are concerned with the more specific matters of the poetic image, style, and language.

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...

The most important theatrical movement in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe, the commedia dell'arte has inspired playwrights, artists, and musicians including Moliere, Dario Fo, Picasso, and Stravinsky. Because of its stock characters, improvised dialogue, and extravagant theatricalism, the commedia dell'arte is often assumed to be a superficial comic style. With Befriending the Commedia dell'Arte of Flaminio Scala, Natalie Crohn Schmitt demolishes that assumption.

By reconstructing the commedia dell'arte scenarios published by troupe...

As Tylus leads us through the city, she shares her passion for Siena in novelistic prose, while never losing sight of the historical complexities that have made Siena one of the most fascinating and beautiful towns in Europe. Today, Siena can appear...

"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...