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This translation brings the complete works of three minor but important Italian poets - Dante's contemporaries at the turn of the 14th century - to English speakers for the very first time. Taken together, the three authors sketch an idealized portrait of courtly life juxtaposed to the gritty, politically fractured world of northern Italy's mercantile urban centers in which they lived. One poet, Folgore di San Gimignano, idealizes court life during the period; the second, Cenne da la Chitarra, l...

This book examines the processes involved in writing the lives of women, both as autobiographies and as biographies. Some essays are theoretical discussions about the constructions of self-articulation in women's life writing. Others are more autobiographical, emphasizing the importance of self-articulation for creating possibilities for self-direction. Adopting different theoretical approaches, chapters in this collection highlight the connections between subjectivity and history, feminist conc...

Positing a dynamic relationship between print culture and social experience, Bronwen Wilson's The World in Venice focuses on the printed image during a century of profound transformation. City views, costume illustrations, events, and portraits of locals and foreigners are brought together to show how printmakers responded to an expanding image of the world in Renaissance Venice, and how, in turn, prints influenced the ways in which individuals thought about themselves. Woodcuts and engravings...

This volume is a reference work, organized chronologically in its sections, with a separate entry for each translator's work. The sections are defined by the type of translations they comprise. The plan of the book is encyclopedic in nature: some biographical material is provided for each translator; the translations are described briefly, as are their linguistic peculiarities, their implied audiences, their links with other translations, and their general reception. Sample passages from the tra...

Carlo Michelstaedter (1887-1910) committed suicide at the age of 23, days after completing this devastating treatise on the human condition and the course of Western civilisation. This work was deemed to be so radically nihilistic, or so radically idealistic, that publishers shied away from it for decades. This new English translation brings to life the heartfelt text of the precocious Italian-Jewish writer, poet and painter, who - refusing to compromise with life - remained loyal to his ideal o...

This book highlights the centrality of the autobiographical enterprise to Italian women's writing through the twentieth century-a century that has frequently been referred to as the century of the self. Ursula Fanning addresses the thorny issue of essentialism potentially involved in underlining links between women's writing and autobiographical modes, and ultimately rejects it in favor of an argument based on the cultural, linguistic, and literary marginalization of women writers within the Ita...

Offers a selection of Italian poems, with notes and commentary in English, and critical essays on individual authors and trends. This volume covers the period from the early years of the twentieth century up to the 1970s, and focuses on the work of poets such as Ungaretti and Saba. It is intended for those with a good working knowledge of Italian.

This study examines all the characterizations of the female personality in the Divine Comedy, including representations of things traditionally categorized as feminine. Marianne Shapiro treats different traditional feminine roles such as wife, lover, and mother, and places Beatrice in the latter group. The problem of woman is studied within the general context of medieval literature. Shapiro's conclusions center largely upon Dante's adherence to a generally misogynistic tradition. While in his...

Die Autorin zeigt anhand ausgewahlter italienischer Autorinnen, wie ambivalent sich die Thematik der weiblichen Emanzipation in der tabuisierten Gesellschaft vor und nach der Jahrhundertwende ausnimmt. Nach einem historischen Abriss uber die Darstellung der Frau in der italienischen Literatur und einem Exkurs uber die Anfange der italienischen Frauenbewegung erfolgt eine eingehende Textanalyse rein literarischer Arbeiten, die Frauen zum Thema Frau verfasst haben. Zu den zum Teil hier wiederentde...

Sienkiewicz's Bodies focuses on the work of the most popular Polish writer from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. It discusses the surprising success of Sienkiewicz's writing in relation to the dissection of optimistic illusion that takes place during a reading of its cruel prose. Sienkiewicz is seen as something more than a juggler of genius in narrative prose. This conservative writer, like the modernists, knew that there was no longer any way to construct a...

This collection of essays, the first of its kind in English or Italian, examines de Cespedes's major texts, asking how the author wrote against Fascism and beyond it. The essays engage current interpretive and heuristic tools and take on a matrix of issues ranging from semiotic to psychoanalytic, from feminist to historical, from a concern for mass culture to cultural studies.

This book is a ten-step journey around the thought and poetry of the most sensitive Italian visionary of modernity, Giacomo Leopardi, whose contribution to Western thought has been acclaimed by admirers from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Benjamin. A variety of readings, moving between different disciplines and approaches - including film studies, psychoanalysis, and queer theory - shed new light on Leopardi's fascinating and at the same time epistemologically radical compound of poetic imaginatio...

The most important theatrical movement in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe, the commedia dell'arte has inspired playwrights, artists, and musicians including Moliere, Dario Fo, Picasso, and Stravinsky. Because of its stock characters, improvised dialogue, and extravagant theatricalism, the commedia dell'arte is often assumed to be a superficial comic style. With Befriending the Commedia dell'Arte of Flaminio Scala, Natalie Crohn Schmitt demolishes that assumption. By reconstructi...