Italian

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's...

The power exercised by the mother on the son in Mediterranean cultures has been amply studied. Italy is a special case in the Modern Era and the phenomenon of Mammismo italiano is indeed well known. Scholars have traced this obsession with the mother...

In Italy to Argentina: Travel Writing and Emigrant Colonialism, Tullio Pagano examines Italian emigration to Argentina and the Rio de la Plata region through the writings of Italian economists, poets, anthropologists, and political activists from the...

The essays in this volume revisit the Italian Renaissance to rethink spaces thought to be defined and certain: from the social spaces of convent, court, or home, to the literary spaces of established genres such as religious plays or epic poetry...

Mythologist in Microgroove investigates the ways in which popular music, as well as other popular genres, engaged with and critiqued modern myth during years of cultural and political upheaval, from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s. The Italian...

Ariosto in the Machine Age reveals how the most influential poet of the Renaissance was conjured or appropriated to shape Magical Realism, avant-garde painting, Fascist cultural propaganda, and cinema in modern Italy between the birth of Futurism and the...

Originally published in 1922 and partly from periodicals this book provides a methodological introduction to the reading of Dante's The Divine Comedy, with the aim of removing the confusion surrounding much Dantean literature and helping the reader to...

In Dante and the Limits of the Law, Justin Steinberg offers the first comprehensive study of the legal structure essential to Dante's Divine Comedy. Steinberg reveals how Dante imagines an afterlife dominated by sophisticated laws, hierarchical...

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Since World War II, Italy has struggled to recast both its colonial past and its alliance with Nazi Germany. For many years, pervading much...

This book chronicles the demise of the supposedly leftist Italian cultural establishment during the long 1980s. During that time, the nation's literary and intellectual vanguard managed to lose the prominence handed it after the end of World War II and...

Drawing on a variety of psychoanalytic approaches, ten critics engage in exciting discussions of the ways the "inner life" is depicted in the Renaissance and the ways it is shown to interact with the "external" social and economic spheres. Spurred by the...

The present volume is the first study in the English language to focus specifically on Italian crime fiction, weaving together a historical perspective and a thematic approach, with a particular focus on the representation of space, especially city...

Righteous Anger in Contemporary Italian Literary and Cinematic Narratives analyses the role of passion - particularly indignation - and how it shapes intention and inspires the work of many contemporary Italian writers and filmmakers. Noting how art...

Honorable mention in the MLA's Howard R. Marraro Prize 2017 This book identifies a strand of what it calls "Accidental Orientalism" in narratives by Italians who found themselves in Ottoman Egypt and Anatolia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth...

This volume explores Italian science fiction from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, covering literary texts, films, music and visual works by figures as diverse as Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Peter Kolosimo, Primo Levi, Antonio Margheriti, Gilda...

Ugo Foscolo's Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, written between 1799 and 1815, was the first true Italian novel. Its epistolary form is in the eighteenth-century tradition of novels like Clarissa Harlowe and the Nouvelle Heloise. Jacopo's tragic love for...

This book pursues the specific case of Italian travel narratives in the Far East, through a focus on the experience of Japan in works by writers who visited the Land of the Rising Sun beginning in the Meiji period (1868-1912) and during the concomitant...

Images of southern Italy as a place of arrival for migrants with different origins and backgrounds have in recent years proliferated in Italian media as well as in contemporary Italian literature and cinema. The unprecedented perspective which presents...

A prolific member of the Tuscan verismo school of literary realism, Mario Pratesi (1842-1921) was much respected during his career but sadly neglected after his death. Using Pratesi's personal archive, now preserved at Victoria College in the University...

The essays in this volume revisit the Italian Renaissance to rethink spaces thought to be defined and certain: from the social spaces of convent, court, or home, to the literary spaces of established genres such as religious plays or epic poetry...

Honorable mention in the MLA's Howard R. Marraro Prize 2017 This book identifies a strand of what it calls “Accidental Orientalism” in narratives by Italians who found themselves in Ottoman Egypt and Anatolia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth...

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 opens...

This book is a new history of early modern gender, told through the lyric poetry of Renaissance Italy. In the evolution of Western gender roles, the Italian Renaissance was a watershed moment, when a confluence of cultural developments disrupted...

Chiara Matraini (1515-1604) was a member of the great flowering of poetic imitators and innovators in the Italian literary heritage begun by Petrarch, cultivated later by the lyric poet Pietro Bembo, and supplanted by the epic poet Torquato Tasso. Though...

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...

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 deeply...

Barbara Spackman here examines the ways in which decadent writers adopted the language of physiological illness and alteration as a figure for psychic otherness. By means of an ideological and rhetorical analysis of scientific as well as literary texts,...

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 his...

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 which...

Presented for the first time in a critical English edition, Urania: A Romance provides modern readers with a rare glimpse into the novel and novella forms at a time when narrative genres were not only being invented but, in the hands of women like Giulia...

Renowned today for his contribution to the rise of the modern European fairy tale, Giovan Francesco Straparola (c. 1480-c. 1557) is particularly known for his dazzling anthology The Pleasant Nights. Originally published in Venice in 1550 and 1553, this...

An important locus for English-speaking writers, the region of Tuscany is also well represented in the Italian literary canon. In Tuscan Spaces, Silvia Ross focuses on constructions of Tuscany in twentieth-century Italian literature and juxtaposes them...

Combining close textual readings with a broad theoretical perspective, Gender, Narrative, and Dissonance in the Modern Italian Novel is a study of the ways in which gender shapes the principal characters and narratives of seven important Italian novels...

David Dean Brockman connects spirituality with psychoanalysis throughout this book as he looks at Dante's early writings, his life story and his "polysemous" classical poem The Divine Comedy. Dante wanted to create a document that would educate the...

Dante put Muhammad in one of the lowest circles of Hell. At the same time, the medieval Christian poet placed several Islamic philosophers much more honorably in Limbo. Furthermore, it has long been suggested that for much of the basic framework of the...

You would as well look for blood in a corpse as for the least shred of decency in a man . . . Without help from their wives, men are just like unlit lamps . . . Just think of them as an unreliable clock that tells you it's ten o'clock when it's...

A story of love and grief. `I became a widower and a father on the same day' says Joseph Luzzi. His book tells how Dante's `The Divine Comedy' helped him to endure his grief, raise their infant daughter, and rediscover love. On a cold November morning,...

A vital addition to Seagull's growing Italian List that focuses on leftist Italian thought, bringing famous as well as little-known yet crucial voices into the English language. As speaking animals, we continuously make use of an unassuming grammatical...

Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" has, despite its enormous popularity and importance, often stymied readers with its multitudinous characters, references, and themes. But until the publication in 2007 of Guy Raffa's "Guide to the Inferno", students...

This volume presents the first translation in English of the complete poetry of Giacomo da Lentini, the first major lyric poet of the Italian vernacular. He was the leading exponent of the Sicilian School (c.1220-1270) as well as the inventor of the...