Scholarship on Italian emigration has generally omitted the Julian-Dalmatians, a group of Italians from Istria and Dalmatia, two regions that, in the wake of World War Two, were ceded by Italy to Yugoslavia as part of its war reparations to that cou…
Often hailed as one of the greatest television series of all time, The Sopranos is a product of its time, firmly embedded in the problems of post-industrial, post-ethnic America. In The Sopranos: Born under a Bad Sign, Franco Ricci examines the grou…
Focusing on both ritual and mass-visual representations of history in 1920s and 1930s Italy, The Historic Imaginary unveils how Italian Fascism sought to institutionalize a modernist culture of history. The study takes a new historicist and microhis…
Cosmopoiesis means world-making, and in this erudite, polemical book, Professor Mazzotta traces how major medieval and Renaissance thinkers invented their worlds through utopias, magic, science, art, and theatre. The Renaissance is usually read from…
From the mysterious glosses by 'EK' in the poetry of Edmund Spenser, to the self-commentary in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, readers of literature have been fascinated by the comments, addenda, and footnotes added by authors to their own work. In th…
The Mirage of America in Contemporary Italian Literature and Film explores the use of images associated with the United States in Italian novels and films released between the 1980s and the 2000s. In this study, Barbara Alfano looks at the ways in w…
The Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio has had a long and colourful history in English translation. This new interdisciplinary study presents the first exploration of the reception of Boccaccio's writings in English literary culture, tracing his pres…
After years of obscurity, Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998) is emerging as one of the most important Italian authors of the twentieth-century, taking her place alongside such luminaries as Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, and Elsa Morante. Anna Maria Ortese:…
Italy has been imagined and re-imagined by Western civilization from the latter part of the Renaissance to the present day. The Italian in Modernity provides a comprehensive overview of this conceptualization, in a volume that promises to become the…
Italian is unique among modern European languages, for although it has a history going back eight centuries, it has only consolidated as a spoken national language during the twentieth century. Previously, it was a written, literary language, and pe…
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. De…
The debate on literature and the arts provoked by the Italian neoavant-garde (neoavanguardia) is undoubtedly one of the most animated and controversial the country has witnessed from World War II to the present. Comprising the period between the lat…
The Story-Takers charts new territory in public pedagogy through an exploration of the multiple forms of communal protests against the mafia in Sicily. Writing at the rich juncture of cultural, feminist, and psychoanalytic theories, Paula M. Salvio…
Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) is one of Italy's most canonical and beloved poets. In Beyond the Family Romance, Maria Truglio offers fresh insight into the uncanny qualities of Pascoli's domestic verse. As suggested by the Freudian title, this study…
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…
Migiel challenges readers to pay attention to Boccaccio's language and ultimately, Migiel contends, the stories of the Decameron suggest that as women become more empowered, the limitations on them, including the threat of violence, become more insi…
Both a passionate denunciation of masculinist readings of the Decameron and a meticulous critique of previous feminist analyses, Marilyn Migiel's A Rhetoric of the Decameron offers a sophisticated re-examination of the representations of women, men,…
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the production of literary and cultural manifestoes enjoyed a veritable boom and accompanied the rise of many avant-garde movements. Legitimizing the Artist considers this phenomenon as a respons…
At the end of the First World War, countries across Europe participated in an unprecedented ritual in which a single, anonymous body was buried to symbolize the overwhelming trauma of the battlefields. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier explores the cr…
Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, a collection of lyric poems on sacred and profane love and other subjects, has traditionally been viewed as reflecting the conflicted nature of its author. However, award winning author Thomas E. Peterson argues…
Written in the mid-fifteenth century, Pope Pius II's Commentaries are the only known autobiography of a reigning pontiff and a fundamental text in the history of Renaissance humanism. In this book, Emily O'Brien positions Pius' expansive autobiograp…
This workbook offers the teacher of Italian a varied collection of activities for the classroom. The thirty-one activities involve situations and guided exercises for creating dialogues, exchanging information, providing descriptions, and completing…
This book is an outstanding collection of readings in Italian designed to introduce language students to contemporary Italian culture while developing their skills in reading, speaking, writing, and listening. The selections in L'Italia verso il Due…
The Italian fascists under Benito Mussolini appropriated many aspects of the country's Catholic religious heritage to exploit the mystique and power of the sacred. One concept that the regime deployed as a core strategy was that of "sacrifice." In t…
In this companion volume to L'Italia verso il Duemila, Ugo Skubikowski provides a glimpse into authentic Italian life through the presentation of twelve interviews with Italians. Intended as a text for students in second-year university and beyond,…
In Italian Cultural Lineages, Jonathan White seeks answers to the elusive questions: what is Italian culture and what is the Italian identity? By tracing Italian life and art through several themes - viewing and spectatorship, fantasy, passion, just…
Poet, novelist, dramatist, polemicist, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini continues to be one of the most influential intellectuals of post-war Italy. In Pasolini: The Sacred Flesh, Stefania Benini examines his corporeal vision of the sacred, focusin…
This study re-examines Venice's political economy from the viewpoint of its ordinary people or popolani who, despite the commonly held view that they were excluded from political life by the nobility or nobili, actually organized and ran for themsel…
The nationalization of the postal service in Italy transformed post-unification letter writing as a cultural medium. Both a harbinger of progress and an expanded, more efficient means of circulating information, the national postal service served as…
"Love drives and gives life to the commerce of mankind." Thus, the sixteen year old Ferdinando Galiani (1728-1787) presented his project to understand the sociable nature of man. This observation, a reflection of his own position on the relation bet…
Widely considered one of the greatest works produced in Europe during the Middle Ages, Dante's La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) has influenced countless generations of readers, yet surprisingly few books have attempted to explain the philosoph…
Eighteenth-century Italian playwright Pietro Chiari designated the age he lived in 'The Century of Women' - an age when women gained considerable power through education and admission to various academic positions and professions. Structured as an e…
Although Italo Calvino (1923-1985) is one of the most widely read and translated Italian novelists of the century, a comprehensive analytical work in English of his writings has been unavailable until now. In this new study Angela Jeannet offers a r…
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 po…
In 1996, Ignazio Silone, one of the most beloved folk heroes of the Italian Left, a novelist and a high-ranking Communist Party member, was unmasked as a secret supporter of the Fascist movement. The discovery sparked a highly emotional response amo…
While Umberto Eco's intellectual itinerary was marked by his early studies of post-Crocean aesthetics and his spectacular concentration on linguistics, information theory, structuralism, semiotics, cognitive science, and media studies, what constitu…
By 1520, Niccolo Machiavelli's life in Florence was steadily improving: he had achieved a degree of literary fame, and, following his removal from the Florentine Chancery by the Medici family, he had managed to gain their respect and patronage. But…
This study offers a sustained examination of the presentation of eastern Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa in two of the most important chivalric epics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato (149…
Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000) was a Jewish Italian novelist, poet, essayist, editor, and intellectual. A cosmopolitan writer concerned with the problems of Jewish identity and history, Bassani was deeply affected by the persecution and deportation of…
Located on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, the area known as Dalmatia, part of modern-day Croatia and Montenegro, was part of the Austrian Empire during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dalmatia was a multicultural region that had trad…
The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell'Arte Stage examines the emergence of the professional actress from the 1560s onwards in Italy. Tracing the historical progress of actresses from their earliest appearances as sideshow attra…
Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso is one of the masterpieces of the Renaissance, a work which, many argue, signalled the apogee of Renaissance fancy on the precipice of irony and decline. This collection of essays brings together twelve noted Itali…
Primo Levi (1919-1987) was an Italian chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor who used a combination of testimony, essays, and creative writing to explore crucial themes related to the Shoah. His voice is among the most important to emerge from this…
In the ancient world, friendship was a virtue of great philosophical importance. Aristotle wrote extensively about it, as did Cicero. Their conception of friendship as a relationship based on reason and virtue was transformed by Christianity into a…
Italian words that resemble words in English but have different meanings are the cause of student bafflement and some hilariously mistaken usage. Examples of falsi amici that continue to amuse teachers of Italian include casino, which is a brothel o…
One of the most celebrated Italian writers of the early Romantic period, Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827) was known primarily as a novelist, a poet, and a nationalist. Following the Napoleonic Wars, he lived in self-exile in England during the last decade of…
Their provocative manifestos and outrageous performances earned the Italian Futurists international fame but, surprisingly, very little recognition outside of Italy for their actual achievements. The few English and American critics who have studied…
The ugly woman is a surprisingly common figure in Italian poetry, one that has been frequently appropriated by male poetic imagination to depict moral, aesthetic, social, and racial boundaries. Mostly used between the thirteenth and seventeenth cent…
The writings of Italo Svevo (1861-1928), who was a pioneer of the modernist novel in Italy, are being revived in both Italian and English. Giuliana Minghelli's In the Shadow of the Mammoth uses Svevo's parodic Darwinian fable of the prehistoric enco…
Pope Benedict XIV Lambertini (r. 1740-58) was one of the driving forces behind the Italian Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. His campaign to reconcile faith and empirical science, re-launch a dialogue between the Church and the European intel…
Stillness in Motion brings together the writing of scholars, theorists, and artists on the uneasy relationship between Italian culture and photography. Highlighting the depth and complexity of the Italian contribution to the technology and practice…
