Of the many treatises written in Italy during the Counter-Reformation, none is more illustrative of the intellectual fermentation of the period than Comanini's work on the purpose of painting, Il Figino overo del fine della Pittura (1591). Although…
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) experimented with such a wide variety of genres that critics have tended to focus more on the differences among his works than on their underlying similarities. However, a more comprehensive examination of his corpus r…
The Art of Objects is a cultural history of early Italian industrialism, set against the political, social, and intellectual background of post-unification Italy, and a cutting-edge investigation of the formation of Italy's industrial culture at the…
Covering a period from the late-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth century, Aileen A. Feng's engagingly written work identifies and analyzes a Latin humanist precursor to the poetic movement known as Renaissance Petrarchism. Though Petrachism is usually re…
Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Post-war Italy examines how the artists and intellectuals of post-war Italy dealt with the 'shameful' heritage of their fascist upbringing and education by trying to craft a new cultural identity for…
In classical and early modern rhetoric, to write or speak using the voice of a dead individual is known as eidolopoeia. Whether through ghost stories, journeys to another world, or dream visions, Renaissance writers frequently used this rhetorical d…
In the seventeenth century, Florence was the splendid capital of the Medici Grand Dukedom of Tuscany. Meanwhile, the Jews in its tiny Ghetto struggled to earn a living by any possible means, especially loan-sharking, rag-picking and second-hand deal…
'And by now, mind, it's too late to redeem your debts by giving up guzzling.' Dante's poetic correspondence (or tenzone) with Forese Donati, a relative of his wife, was rife with crude insults: the two men derided one another on topics ranging from…
Detective fiction is a universally popular genre; stories about the investigation of a crime by a detective are published all over the world and in hundreds of languages. Detective fiction provides more than entertainment, however; it often has a gr…
Looking at five of Italo Calvino's often neglected early novels: The Young People of Po, The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, The Non-Existent Knight, and The Watcher, Eugenio Bolongaro argues that these works, written between 1948 and 1963,…
A resolution to the vexed problem whether a troubadour's love is erotic or spiritual is offered by Paolo Cherchi through a new reading of Andreas Capellanus' De Amore (written around 1186-1196). He suggests that Andreas, using a rhetorical strategy…
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the seminal works of western literature. Its impact on modern culture has been enormous, nourishing a plethora of twentieth century authors from Joyce and Borges to Kenzaburo Oe. Although Da…
Divided into ten days of ten novellas each, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is one of the literary gems of the fourteenth century. The 'Decameron' Third Day in Perspective is an interpretive guide to the stories of the text's Third Day. For each nove…
The movie screen has been the forum for many star pairings: Bogart and Bacall, Tracy and Hepburn, and Fellini and Kafka. While this latter combination might seem slightly unexpected or improbable at first sight, Carlo Testa's Masters of Two Arts dem…
Despite its undeniable impact on modern literature, there are very few comprehensive studies of literary works produced in Italy from the end of the eighteenth- to the twentieth century. The Invention of Modern Italian Literature examines the method…
As the Second World War drew to a close, European borders were being redrawn. The regions of Istria, Dalmatia, and Venezia Giulia, nominally Italian but at various times also belonging to Austria and Germany, fell under the rule of Yugoslavia and it…
Italian Modernism was written in response to the need for an historiographic and theoretical reconsideration of the concepts of Decadentismo and the avant-garde within the Italian critical tradition. Focussing on the confrontation between these conc…
A Multitude of Women looks at the ways in which both Italian literary tradition and external influences have assisted Italian women writers in rethinking the theoretical and aesthetic ties between author, text, and readership in the construction of…
The 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 e…
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 B…
The history of totalitarian states bears witness to the fact that literature and print media can be manipulated and made into vehicles of mass deception. Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy is the first comprehensive account of how the Fascis…
Every year, Italy swells with millions of tourists who infuse the economy with billions of dollars and almost outnumber Italians themselves. In fact, Italy has been a model tourist destination for longer than it has been a modern state. The Beautifu…
In Lodovico Dolce: Renaissance Man of Letters, Ronnie Terpening revives and reassesses the work of a minor but significant sixteenth-century humanist, said to have led a life 'both wretched and glorious.' Although Dolce (1510? - 1568) gained univers…
The Wrong Door is the first English-language translation of the complete plays of Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991). Bringing together the eleven plays Ginzburg wrote between 1965 and the months before her death, this volume directs attent…
The past two decades have witnessed increasing opposition to mafia influence and activities in Italy. Community organizations such as Libera, founded in 1995, and Addiopizzo, originating in 2004, exemplify how Italian society has tried to come toget…
Widely acclaimed as America's greatest living film director, Martin Scorsese is also, some argue, the pre-eminent Italian American artist. Although he has treated various subjects in over three decades, his most sustained filmmaking and the core of…
Born in Bologna in 1922, filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most controversial European intellectuals of his time. Pasolini believed the 'authentic' Italy - with its many languages and subcultures, its ancient roots and idiosyncrasies - to…
In 1948, the poet Eugenio Montale published his Quaderno di traduzioni and created an entirely new Italian literary genre, the "translation notebook." The quaderni were the work of some of Italy's foremost poets, and their translation anthologies pr…
With The Ethical Dimension of the "Decameron" Marilyn Migiel, author of A Rhetoric of the "Decameron" (winner of the MLA's 2004 Marraro Prize), returns to Giovanni Boccaccio's masterpiece, this time to focus on the dialogue about ethical choices tha…
The Nobel Prize-winning dramatist Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is undoubtedly one of the most innovative playwrights of the twentieth century and also one of the most complex. While his influence spread throughout modernist and postmodernist works,…
Enlightening Encounters traces the impact of photography on Italian literature from the medium's invention in 1839 to the present day. Investigating the ways in which Italian literature has responded to photographic practice and aesthetics, the cont…
Selena Daly's work is the first comprehensive study of Futurism during the First World War period. In this book, she examines the cultural, political, and military engagement of the Futurists with the war effort, both on the battlefields and on the…
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…
Since its economic boom in the late 1950s, Italy has grappled with the environmental legacy of rapid industrial growth and haphazard urban planning. One notable effect is a preponderance of interstitial landscapes such as abandoned fields, polluted…
Lina Bolzoni's impressive study of the memory culture of sixteenth-century Italy appears here for the first time in English translation. Since its original incarnation as La stanza della memoria: Modelli letterari e iconografici nell'eta della stamp…
In this ground-breaking work, Ellen Nerenberg offers an analysis of the confinement experience in Italian narrative between 1930 and 1960, the last fifteen years of Fascism and the fifteen that followed. Nerenberg diverges from the notion that a rad…
Although there exist a number of studies on prison writing from various countries, Sentences is the first comprehensive examination of autobiographical prison literature from Italy. Klopp has assembled a gallery of fascinating portraits in this chro…
Benedetto Croce was the foremost Italian philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century and his influence extended to every aspect of intellectual life in Italy. He played a significant, sometimes crucial, role in Italian politics, and his w…
Recognized as a master of Italian cinema, Vittorio De Sica is perhaps best known and most respected for his critically acclaimed neorealist films of the period 1946-55. As this anthology reveals, however, his production was remarkably multifaceted.…
The mobility of women is a central issue in feminist analysis of literary works and historical periods. Rewriting the Journey in Contemporary Italian Literature explores the concept of the journey from feminist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial pers…
The Tigress in the Snow explores how literature reacted to, influenced, and shaped the evolving notion of motherhood in twentieth-century Italy. From the late-nineteenth century rhetorical celebration of the mother as Madonna, to the Fascist regime'…
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 fea…
One of twentieth-century Italy's greatest thinkers, Primo Levi (1919-1987) started reflecting on the Holocaust almost immediately after his return home from the year he survived in Auschwitz. Levi's powerful Holocaust testimonials reveal his preoccu…
The first of its kind in English, Mafia and Outlaw Stories from Italian Life and Literature is a selection of readings from Italian fiction and non-fiction writers on the subject of the Mafia. Among the renowned writers featured are Giovanni Verga,…
During the early decades of the twentieth century, Italy produced distinctive innovations in both the intellectual and political realms. On the one hand, Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944) spearheaded a radical rethinking o…
Femininity in the form of the donna-crisi, or "crisis-woman," was a fixture of fascist propaganda in the early 1930s. A uniquely Italian representation of the modern woman, she was cosmopolitan, dangerously thin, and childless, the antithesis of the…
The last decade has witnessed an outpouring of Italian films that deal with Fascism, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. This would appear to mark a distinct change from the postwar reluctance to represent such an infamous history. Roberto Benigni's po…
Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism provides a unique analysis of the political life of the major Italian philosopher and literary figure Benedetto Croce (1866-1952). Relying on a range of resources rarely used before in Croce studies - including po…
The nineteenth century represents a crucial historical and cultural phase in the development of modern Italy. Writing to Delight provides a selection of short stories written by some of the most accomplished and acclaimed female authors of nineteent…
Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is the best known and most read work in Italian literature next to Dante's Divine Comedy. In the tradition of Lectura Dantis, the practice of story-by-story critical readings of Dante's work, Elissa Weaver has collecte…
