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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 Italian and American scholars to provide a complete picture of Ariosto and all his works, covering topics such as historical criticism relating to Ariosto's place and time; philological investigations into the varying literary styles of the author, especi...

Through an interpretation of Montaigne's philosophical vision as expressed in his Essays, Ermanno Bencivenga contributes to the current debate about the "death of the subject" by developing a view of the self as a project of continuous construction rather than the source and foundation of knowledge. This latter, Cartesian conception of self-consciousness as a logical and epistemological starting point is, Bencivenga contends, delusive: the certainty it provides is more akin to faith than to a co...

Questo volume antologico illustrato e concepito per una fascia di lettori interessata ad avvicinarsi al pensiero e all'opera di Pier Paolo Pasolini. Questo libro ha 80 pagine, stampate su carta paglierina) ed prefatto da un lungo saggio critico di 11 pagine, dal titolo "Pasolini: scandalo e fama". Il lettore trovera incluse note poesie, foto storiche dell'autore, brani epigrammatici e saggi celebri di Pier Paolo Pasolini su argomenti come la societa dei consumi e la cultura di massa. Il volume i...

The Intellectual as a Detective: From Leonardo Sciascia to Roberto Saviano offers a fresh perspective on both Italian crime fiction and the role of the intellectual in Italian society. By analyzing the characterization of men of culture as investigators, this book addresses their social commitment in a period that goes from the Sixties to today. The connection it establishes between fiction and real life makes this book an interesting addition to the debate on crime literature and its social fun...

Dante's Volume from Alpha to Omega brings together essays written by internationally recognized scholars to explore the poet's encyclopedic impulse in light of our own frenzied information age. This comprehensive collection of essays, coedited by Carol Chiodo and Christiana Purdy Moudarres, examines how Dante's spiritual quest is powered by an encyclopedic one, which has for more than seven centuries drawn a readership as diverse as the knowledge his work contains. The essays investigate both th...

La notion d'histoire litteraire, dans sa double acception de discours critique sur les oeuvres et de reflexion sur la formation des structures et des categories de l'historiographie litteraire moderne, est au coeur de ce recueil, qui reunit des articles parus dans des ouvrages collectifs (revues, actes de colloques, melanges) sur une quarantaine d'annees, en italien ou en francais. La litterature italienne contemporaine d'un cote (Gabriele d'Annunzio, Luigi Pirandello, Alessandro Bonsanti, Italo...

The first treatise ever written on the sociology of cities, On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities (1588) marked a radical departure from previous literature on urban centres. It provided a revolutionary analysis of how cities function, and of the political, economic, demographic and geographic factors that cause their growth and decline. Noteworthy too is Botero's strikingly original use of sources in his analysis: moving beyond familiar classical and biblical references, he...

The first extended analysis of the relationship between Italian criminology and crime fiction in English, Methods of Murder examines works by major authors both popular, such as Gianrico Carofiglio, and canonical, such as Carlo Emilio Gadda. Many scholars have argued that detective fiction did not exist in Italy until 1929, and that the genre, which was considered largely Anglo-Saxon, was irrelevant on the Italian peninsula. By contrast, Past traces the roots of the twentieth-century literature...

This collection of essays comprises cultural analyses of practices of eremitism and reclusiveness in the USA, which are inseparably linked to the American ideals of individualism and freedom. Covering a time frame from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, the essays study cultural products such as novels, poems, plays, songs, paintings, television shows, films, and social media, which represent the costs and benefits of deliberate withdrawal and involuntary isolation from society. Thus, t...

This study recovers Italo Calvino's central place in a lost history of interdisciplinary thought, politics, and literary philosophy in the 1960s. Drawing on his letters, essays, critical reviews, and fiction, as well as a wide range of works--primarily urban planning and design theory and history--circulating among his primary interlocutors, this book takes as its point of departure a sweeping reinterpretation of Invisible Cities. Passages from Calvino's most famous novel routinely appear as aph...

Frauen war lange der Zugang zur Gattung Autobiografie verschlossen; sie griffen auf Subgenres zuruck und schufen so komplexe autobiografische Diskurse. Seit den 1980er Jahren wird autobiografisches Schreiben von Frauen in Verbindung mit der poststrukturalistischen und feministischen Theorie betrachtet. Die Beitrage in diesem Sammelband konzentrieren sich auf autobiografische Texte aus den letzten 15 Jahren und aus unterschiedlichen Kulturraumen. Alle hier besprochenen Kunstwerke stellen kein mon...

Author of more than thirteen books and several volumes of poetry, screenwriter, and director, Edith Bruck is one of the leading literary voices in Italy, attracting increasing attention in the English-speaking world not least for her powerful Holocaust testimony, which is often compared with the work of her contemporaries Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani. Born in Hungary in 1932, she was deported with her family to the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, Christianstadt, Landsberg, and Bergen...