Selected Resources by Topic
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The Cambridge History of Italian Literature
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ISBN: 0521434920Date: 1997Italy possesses one of the richest and most influential literatures of Europe, stretching back to the thirteenth century. This first substantial history of Italian literature to appear in the English language for forty years provides a comprehensive survey of Italian writing from its earliest origins up to the present day. Leading scholars describe and assess the work of writers who have contributed to the Italian literary tradition, including Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, the Renaissance humanists, Machiavelli, Ariosto and Tasso, pioneers and practitioners of commedia dell'arte and opera, and the contemporary novelists Calvino and Eco. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature sets out to be accessible to the general reader as well as to students and scholars: translations are provided, along with a map, chronological chart and up-to-date and substantial bibliographies. -
Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture
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Date: 2006In this book, Teodolinda Barolini explores the sources of Italian literary culture in the figures of its lyric poets and its "three crowns": Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Barolini views the origins of Italian literary culture through four prisms: the ideological/philosophical, the intertextual/multicultural, the structural/formal, and the social. The essays in the first section treat the ideology of love and desire from the early lyric tradition to the Inferno and its antecedents in philosophy and theology. In the second, Barolini focuses on Dante as heir to both the Christian visionary and the classical pagan traditions (with emphasis on Vergil and Ovid). The essays in the third part analyze the narrative character of Dante's Vita nuova, Petrarch's lyric sequence, and Boccaccio's Decameron. Barolini also looks at the cultural implications of the editorial history of Dante's rime and at what sparso versus organico spells in the Italian imaginary. In the section on gender, she argues that the didactic texts intended for women's use and instruction, as explored by Guittone, Dante, and Boccaccio—but not by Petrarch—were more progressive than the courtly style for which the Italian tradition is celebrated. Moving from the lyric origins of the Divine Comedy in "Dante and the Lyric Past" to Petrarch's regressive stance on gender in "Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature"—and encompassing, among others, Giacomo da Lentini, Guido Cavalcanti, and Guittone d'Arezzo—these sixteen essays by one of our leading critics frame the literary culture of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Italy in fresh, illuminating ways that will prove useful and instructive to students and scholars alike. -
Introduction to Twentieth Century Italian Literature: A Difficult Modernity
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Date: 2005Twentieth-century Italy was marked by a profound and often convulsive transformation in both society and culture, accompanied at various stages by war, violence and dictatorship. This was Italy's "difficult" entry into modernity. The voices of Italian literature responded to this transformation with a bewildering combination of excitement and anxiety, from the loud embrace of the new in Futurism to melancholy laments for tradition. In the process, some of the greatest works of modern literature were created. Robert Gordon offers a vivid overview of the century's literature, charting a series of motifs of Italy's "difficult modernity"—from war to the city, from language to geography, from marginal groups to avant-garde movements—through a wide array of writers and texts. -
Manuscript Poetics: Materiality and Textuality in Medieval Italian Literature
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Date: 2023Manuscript Poetics explores the interrelationship between the material features of textual artifacts and the literary aspects of the medieval Italian texts they preserve. This original study is both an investigation into the material foundations of literature and a reflection on notions of textuality, writing, and media in late medieval and early modern Italy. Francesco Marco Aresu examines the book-objects of manuscripts and early printed editions, asking questions about the material conditions of production, circulation, and reception of literary works. He invites scholars to reconcile reading with seeing (and with touching) and to challenge contemporary presumptions about technological neutrality and the modes of interfacing and reading. Manuscript Poetics investigates the correspondences between textuality and materiality, content and medium, and visual-verbal messages and their physical support through readings of Dante Alighieri's Vita nova, Giovanni Boccaccio's Teseida, and Francesco Petrarca's canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta). Aresu shows that Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarca evaluated and deployed the tools of scribal culture to shape, signal, or layer meanings beyond those they conveyed in their written texts. Medieval texts, Aresu argues, are uniquely positioned to provide this perspective, and they are foundational to the theoretical understanding of new forms and materials in our media-saturated contemporary world. -
Modern Italian Literature
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Date: 2007This authoritative and vividly written book brings readers into the heart of Italian literary culture from the 1690s to the present. It probes the work of major authors in their broad cultural context, traces the history of audiences and publishers, explores the shifting relationship between public and private, assesses the impact of significant historical trends and events on creative processes, and establishes the continuities as well as the discontinuities of the Italian literary tradition. A synoptic overview at the beginning of the volume is designed to help the reader get her or his bearings in the detail of the nine chapters which follow. Using an essentially chronological framework, the book is divided into three major cultural time-spans: the long eighteenth century, the decades of national identity formation and the creation of modern', industrial Italy between 1816 and 1900, and the twentieth century with its constant renegotiation of national cultural identity. A final epilogue provides a snapshot of Italian literary culture in the near-present. This is a book which will be readily accessible to students and all those interested in Italian culture, and at the same time is based on the most up-to-date scholarship. New readings of the canonical authors rub shoulders with a refreshing attention to standard and popular writing, gender issues, and the interaction between written and oral forms, producing a history of modern Italian literature which is new in its conception and its scope. -
The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature
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Date: 2003Embracing the whole of Italian literature, from the early thirteenth century to the present, The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature takes a broad view of what constitutes literature, covering historical writing, travel writing, theatre, and philosophy as well as the novel, poetry, literary dialogues, and critical theory. Providing generous coverage of canonical figures—from Dante and Petrarch to Montale and Calvino—it also contains a wealth of short entries on significant minor figures. The Companion also explores Latin literature written by Italian authors—a major feature of Renaissance culture—and Italian dialect literature; and highlights articles which place the writers and their works in their wider social, historical, artistic, and political context. The 2,400 alphabetically-arranged entries provide clear, up-to-date coverage of Italian literature, making this an essential reference for specialists and non-specialists alike. Written by expert contributors, the entries reflect the current state of international scholarship, which has developed in many different and exciting directions in recent years.
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The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature
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Date: 1997Over the last 20 years, there has been an increasing interest in feminist views of the Italian literary tradition. While feminist theory and methodology have been accepted by the academic community in the U.S., the situation is very different in Italy, where such work has been done largely outside the academy. Among nonspecialists, knowledge of feminist approaches to Italian literature, and even of the existence of Italian women writers, remains scant. This reference work, the first of its kind on Italian literature, is a companion volume for all who wish to investigate Italian literary culture and writings, both by women and by men, in light of feminist theory. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for authors, schools, movements, genres and forms, figures and types, and similar topics related to Italian literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and summarizes feminist thought on the subject. Entries provide brief bibliographies, and the volume concludes with a selected, general bibliography of major studies. This volume covers eight centuries of Italian literature, from the Middle Ages to the present... -
Homosexuality in Italian Literature, Society, and Culture, 1789-1919
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ISBN: 1443872881Date: 2017Homosexuality, bisexuality, transvestitism, and trans-genders represented new ideas, customs, and mentalities which shattered nineteenth-century Italy. At this time, Italy was a state in the making, with a growing population, a fading aristocracy, and new urban classes entering the scene. While still an extremely Catholic country, atheism and secularization slowly undermined the old, traditional morality, with literature and poetry endorsing innovative fashions coming from abroad. Laxity mixed with perversion, while new forms of sexuality mirrored the immense changes taking place in a society that, since time immemorial, was dominated by the Church and by a rigid class system. This was a revolution, parallel to the political movements that brought about the Unification of Italy in 1861, and was tormented, intense, and occasionally tragic. This collection of essays offers a rather comprehensive overview of this phenomenon. Personalities and places, ideas and novels, poetry and tragedy, law and customs, are the subject of ten essays, written by leading international experts in Italian history, the history of sexuality, literature and poetry. The Italian nineteenth century is a time of a number of rapid changes, visible and invisible revolutions, often given less attention than the unification process. This book makes a substantial contribution to Italian studies and modern European history. -
Moral Combat: Women, Gender, and War in Italian Renaissance Literature
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ISBN: 1487503148Date: 2018The Italian sixteenth century offers the first sustained discussion of women's militarism since antiquity. Across a variety of genres, male and female writers raised questions about women's right and ability to fight in combat. Treatise literature engaged scientific, religious, and cultural discourses about women's virtues, while epic poetry and biographical literature famously featured examples of women as soldiers, commanders, observers, and victims of war. Moral Combat asks how and why women's militarism became one of the central discourses of this age. Gerry Milligan discusses the armed heroines of biography and epic within the context of contemporary debates over women's combat abilities and men's martial obligations. Women are frequently described as fighting because men have failed their masculine duty. A woman's prowess at arms was asserted to be a cultural symptom of men's shortcomings. Moral Combat ultimately argues that the popularity of the warrior woman in sixteenth-century Italian literature was due to her dual function of shame and praise: calling men to action and signaling potential victory to a disempowered people. -
Queer(ing) Gender in Italian Women's Writing
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ISBN: 9781788741750Date: 2021Queer(ing) Gender in Italian Women's Writing is the first study of its kind to systematically use queer theory as a theoretical framework of analysis of Italian women's writing. Focusing especially on the writers Dacia Maraini, Goliarda Sapienza and Elsa Morante, and delimiting the field of enquiry to works written in the 1970s and 1980s, the book positions its chosen texts in their historical and cultural backdrop and illustrates the ways in which the authors responded in highly original ways to the debates of the day in matters of gender and sexuality, bringing them close to current «queer» formulations. Judith Butler is a key interlocutor here, as in the few existing critical contributions offering a «queer» reading of texts from the Italian literary tradition, but rather than rely predominantly on her theorisation of the performative quality of gender, this book incorporates additional concepts that are key to Butler's notion of queer, such as «parody», «citationality», «drag» and «undoing gender». It further seeks to enrich existing critical debates on Italian women's writing, and on Maraini, Sapienza and Morante in particular, by considering them in relation to other influential queer theorists—including Teresa de Lauretis, Jack Halberstam, Lee Edelman, Sara Ahmed and (the author's queer reading of) Julia Kristeva—in the belief that the plurality intrinsic to the formulation of «queer» is crucial for its potential as a tool for critical inquiry. This book was the Joint Winner of the 2017 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Modern Italian Studies. -
Queer Italia: Same-sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film
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ISBN: 0312240244Date: 2004Gary P. Cestaro's Queer Italia includes essays on Italian literature and film, medieval to modern, and attempts to define a queer tradition in Italian culture. Contributors explore the multiform dynamics of sexuality in Italian texts and aim not to promote the mistaken notion of a single homosexuality through history; rather, they upset and undo the equally misguided assumption of an omnipresent heterosexuality by uncovering the complexities of desire in texts from all periods. Somewhat paradoxically, a kind of queer canon results. These essays open a much-needed critical space in the Italian tradition wherein fixed definitions of sexual identity collapse. Queer Italia will be of interest to a wide audience of Italianists, medieval to modern, and queer cultural theorists.
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Fictions of Appetite: Alimentary Discourses in Italian Modernist Literature
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ISBN: 9783034309714Date: 2013Fictions of Appetite explores and investigates the aesthetic significance of images of food, appetite and consumption in a body of modernist literature published in Italian between 1905 and 1939. The corpus examined includes novels, short stories, poems, essays and plays by F.T. Marinetti, Aldo Palazzeschi, Massimo Bontempelli, Paola Masino and Luigi Pirandello. The book underlines the literary relevance and symbolic implications of the «culinary sign», suggesting a link between the crisis of language and subjectivity usually associated with modernism and figures of consumption and corporeal self-obliteration in «alimentary» discourse. In revisiting these works under label of modernism, which has traditionally been shunned in the Italian critical field, the volume brings critical discourse on early twentieth-century Italian literature closely into line with that of other Western literatures. The author argues that an alimentary perspective not only sheds striking new light on each of the texts examined, but also illustrates the signifying power of the culinary sign, its relations to the aesthetic sphere and its prominent role in the construction of a modernist sensibility. -
Food and Women in Italian Literature, Culture and Society: Eve's Sinful Bite
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Date: 2020This book explores how women's relationship with food has been represented in Italian literature, cinema, scientific writings and other forms of cultural expression from the 19th century to the present. Italian women have often been portrayed cooking and serving meals to others, while denying themselves the pleasure of the table. The collection presents a comprehensive understanding of the symbolic meanings associated with food and of the way these intersect with Italian women's socio-cultural history and the feminist movement. From case studies on Sophia Loren and Elena Ferrante, to analyses of cookbooks by Italian chefs, each chapter examines the unique contribution Italian culture has made to perceiving and portraying women in a specific relation to food, addressing issues of gender, identity and politics of the body. -
Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy: The Renaissance of Taste
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ISBN: 9789048552023Date: 2022As the long sixteenth century came to a close, new positive ideas of gusto/ taste opened a rich counter vision of food and taste where material practice, sensory perceptions and imagination contended with traditional social values, morality, and dietetic/medical discourse. Exploring the complex and evocative ways the early modern Italian culture of food was imagined in the literature of the time, Food Culture and the Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy reveals that while a moral and disciplinary vision tried to control the discourse on food and eating in medical and dietetic treatises of the sixteenth century and prescriptive literature, a wide range of literary works contributed to a revolution in eating and taste. In the process long held visions of food and eating, as related to social order and hierarchy, medicine, sexuality and gender, religion and morality, pleasure and the senses, were questioned, tested and overturned, and eating and its pleasures would never be the same. -
The Land of Hunger
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ISBN: 0745608884Date: 1995In this highly original book, Camporesi explores the two worlds of feast and famine in early modern Europe. The Land of Hunger is a graphic and engaging journey into the folk culture of early modern Europe. It will consolidate Camporesi's reputation as one of the most original and imaginative historians of our time. -
Savoring Power, Consuming the Times: The Metaphors of Food in Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature
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Date: 2013Pina Palma's Savoring Power, Consuming the Times: The Metaphors of Food in Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature is an innovative look at the writings of five important Italian authors—Boccaccio's Decameron, Pulci's Morgante, Boiardo's Innamorato, Ariosto's Furioso, and Aretino's Ragionamento. Through the prism of gastronomy, Palma examines these key works in the Western literary canon, bringing into focus how their authors use food and gastronomy as a means to critique the social, political, theological, philosophical, and cultural beliefs that constitute the fabric of the society in which they live. Palma begins with the anthropological principle that food represents the universal transformation of nature into culture and that it functions as a language that distinguishes every society and its culture from others. This suggests that food—its preparation, presentation, and consumption—is more than merely a source of nourishment. Rather, Palma argues, foodstuffs function as ethical and aesthetic instruments through which the literary hero's virtues and flaws, achievements and failures, can be gauged. Food also serves as a means to maintain, as well as to negotiate, power, social hierarchy, and relationships between the powerful and the powerless. Touching on three centuries that were pivotal for Italian culture, literature, and history, as well as three literary genres, Palma's analysis connects the descriptions and references to food found in these works with the wider culture of Italy in the late medieval and early modern period. -
Table Talk: Perspectives on Food in Medieval Italian Literature
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ISBN: 1443825115Date: 2010This volume is comprised of a selection of revised and expanded papers presented at Table Talk: Perspectives on Food in Medieval Italian Literature, a panel held at the 40th annual convention of the Northeast Modern Langauge Association (Boston, February 26–March 1, 2009). Taken together, these essays explore the multifaceted role of food within medieval Italian culture through a variety of literary genres, from the poetry and prose of Dante and Boccaccio to the medical and religious writings of Michele Savonarola and Catherine of Siena. By examining the complexity of food consumption and distribution in the late medieval cultural imagination, the authors seek to advance the recent movement of food studies from the margins of social history to a fertile cross-section of the humanities and social sciences. The four sections into which the work is divided reflect the medical, religious, social and political circumstances that placed Italy at the vanguard of late medieval Europe's dynamic foodways. In embracing the interdisciplinarity that distinguishes food studies as an area of scholarly interest, the essays collected in this volume aim to stimulate further inquiry into the fertile field of food in medieval Italian literature.
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The Fire Within: Desire in Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature
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Date: 2014Desire for love, desire for knowledge, desire to possess, desire to desire and to be desired: our life is shaped by what we want and by our efforts to achieve it. Hailed by philosophers and psychoanalysts as the core of human identity, desire informs not only our actions, but also our dreams and hopes and their sublimation into art and literature. This collection of essays explores how desire is portrayed in modern and contemporary Italian literature, by analysing some of the most interesting literary figures of the last two centuries. The authors of this collection approach desire from various perspectives—psychoanalytical, sociological, political and semiotic—in order to show that desire, albeit at times not explicitly mentioned, pervades the literary works of modern and contemporary Italy, either as a central theme or as the secret motor of the narrative.Through the fil rouge of desire, the essays of this collection highlight the international dimension of Italian literature, establishing a connection between Italian authors and the major theoretical works of the last two centuries. As the notion of desire, as represented in literary texts, is informed by psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts that operate across the boundaries of nationality and language, modernists and scholars of Comparative Literature will find the papers in this book of considerable interest. -
Reimagining the Italian South: Migration, Translation and Subjectivity in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema
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Date: 2022Images of Southern Italy as a place of arrival for migrants with different origins and backgrounds are in recent years proliferating on Italian medias, as well as in contemporary Italian literature and cinema. The unprecedented perspective on the mezzogiorno which presents the region as a place where people arrive and not only as a place of departure, represents a major change in the collective imaginary on the Italian South. This perspective is today articulated in new ways with the longstanding representation of the South as the forever "backward" part of the country. This book presents one of the first studies to focus entirely, through in-depth readings of a range of contemporary literary and cinematic texts, on the representation of contemporary migration to the Italian South, and on the concomitant changes in the tradition of representation of the region. Through the analysis, informed by translation theory and by decolonial, queer and feminist critique, of the mutual construction of race, gender and sexuality, and of the translation and hybridization of languages and cultures, in texts which tell multiple stories of mobility to and through the South, this book traces the emergence of a transnational imaginary of the mezzogiorno which offers useful tools for an urgent reconfiguration of collective and individual identities. -
Resistance, Heroism, Loss: World War II in Italian Literature and Film
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Date: 2018In no other country in Europe has national identity been so closely bound to memories of the war. Italy's Republic was born of World War II, its constitution defined by anti-Fascism, its parties self-identified with national Resistance. Because of their importance to the nation's identity, the nature and meaning of the war have been the focus of great contention, from 1943 to the present day. In recent years Italy has taken on a national evaluation of the more troubling and contested aspects of its role in the war, including its support of Fascism and collaboration after 1943, its treatment of Jews and other minorities, deep national divisions that created a civil war between 1943 and 1945, and the centrality of war myth to lingering postwar problems. Scholars of Italian history, literature, and cinema play a fundamental role in this appraisal, and this volume of essays attests to the importance of film and literature to the ways in which changing political, social and cultural imperatives have altered the war's memory. These articles expand our understanding of the shifting phases in national memory by highlighting significant features of each era's portrayal of the war. -
The Somali Within: Language, Race and Belonging in Minor Italian Literature
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Date: 2015The 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 Félix Guattari's concept of 'minor literature', as well as drawing on postcolonial literary studies, The Somali Within analyses the processes of linguistic and cultural translation and self-translation, the political engagement with race, gender, class and religious discrimination, and the complex strategies of belonging and unbelonging at work in the literary works in Italian by authors of Somali origins. Brioni proposes that the "minor" Somali Italian connection might offer a major insight into the transnational dimension of contemporary "Italian" literature and "Somali" culture.
