In an imaginary dialogue with his editor, Carlo Emilio Gadda wrote that 'the world is baroque', adding that as a writer he had simply 'perceived and depicted its baroqueness.' For Gadda the baroque was not a style but a reality. In Creative Entangle…
In this book, Guy Raffa offers a fresh reading of Dante's major literary works - the Divine Comedy and the Vita nuova - that combines central tenets of incarnational theology and dialectical thought to illuminate the poet's renowned ability to 'have…
Pietro Aretino's literary influence was felt throughout most of Europe during the sixteenth-century, yet English-language criticism of this writer's work and persona has hitherto been sparse. Raymond B. Waddington's study redresses this oversight, d…
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…
Federico Fellini remains the best known of the postwar Italian directors. This collection of essays brings Fellini criticism up to date, employing a range of recent critical filters, including semiotic, psychoanalytical, feminist and deconstructioni…
A prominent and prolific Italian writer, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) is known for her novels, plays, short stories, and essays. This collection brings together, for an English-speaking audience, a variety of critical perspectives on Ginzburg's work…
The contemporary Italian writer Gianni Celati has published work in many different genres, including critical and philosophical essays, fiction, and travel books. Well known in Italy, Celati is growing in popularity with readers in North America and…
The theatre of the Italian Renaissance was directly inspired by the classical stage of Greece and Rome, and many have argued that the former imitated the latter without developing a new theatre tradition. In this book, Salvatore DiMaria investigates…
From Fascism to Democracy tells the story of the birth of the post-war Italian political system through the lens of a single event: the Italian national election of 1948, the first parliamentary election of the Republican era. Robert A. Ventresca of…
Italy possesses two literary canons, one in the Tuscan language and the other made up of the various dialects of its many regions. The Other Italy presents for the first time an overview of the principal authors and texts of Italy's literary canon i…
Grazia Deledda (1871-1936) was the author of many influential novels and remains one of the most significant Italian women writers of her time. However, critics tend to pigeonhole her works into convenient literary categories and to ignore the uniqu…
The end of the Second World War saw the emergence of neorealist film in Italy. In Italian Neorealist Cinema, Christopher Wagstaff analyses three neorealist films that have had significant influence on filmmakers around the world. Wagstaff treats the…
In The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, Jo Ann Cavallo attempts a new interpretation of the history of the renaissance romance epic in northern Italy, focusing on the period's three major chivalric poets. Cavallo challenges previous cri…
One of the founding fathers of the Neo-realist movement and a Communist dedicated to populist filmmaking, Guiseppe De Santis (b. 1917) has been a significant force in Italian cinema. In spite of his crucial contribution De Santis has received little…
Guido Cavalcanti (d. 1300) is one of the greatest Italian poets of all time. His legacy consists of some fifty poems, of which his canzone on the nature of love, Donna me prega (A lady asks me) is the most famously difficult and complex. The poem is…
Reconsidering Boccaccio highlights the great Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio's remarkable achievements in the fourteenth century as a cultural mediator; his exceptional social, geographic, and intellectual range; and the influence of his legacy…
Ignazio Silone, the anti-fascist, Italian author and political activist, continues to intrigue readers and stimulate their minds nearly four decades after his death. On Friendship and Freedom contains the first published collection of correspondence…
Dantean Dialogues is a collection of essays by some of the world's most outstanding Dante scholars., These essays enter into conversation with the main themes of the scholarship of Amilcare Iannucci (d. 2007), one of the leading researchers on Dante…
Giovannino Guareschi (1908-1968) was an Italian journalist, humorist, and cartoonist best known for his short stories based on the fictional Catholic priest Don Camillo. In this study, Alan R. Perry explores the Don Camillo stories from the perspect…
Through a close reading of key texts, including poetic and spiritual writings, fairy tales, and a botanical treatise, Golden Fruit examines the role of oranges in Italian culture from their introduction during the medieval period through to the pres…
Ricci's book ranges widely over Calvino's oeuvre to illustrate the accuracy of the idea articulated by Calvino himself that a visual image lies at the origin of all his narrative. The book's main theme is the difficult interface between word and ima…
An uncompleted manuscript that combines lyric poetry and prose commentary, the Banquet (or Convivio) is one of Dante Alighieri's most important and least understood philosophical texts. As Maria Luisa Ardizzone shows, its language and logic are deep…
Vincenzo Consolo is counted by many critics among the most significant voices in contemporary world literature. This volume makes available for the first in English an edited and annotated volume of Consolo's short stories, essays, and other writing…
