Umberto Eco is Italy's most famous living intellectual, known among academics for his literary and cultural theories, and to an enormous international audience through his novels, The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before. Umberto Eco and the Open Text is the first comprehensive study in English of Eco's work. In clear and accessible language, Peter Bondanella considers not only Eco's most famous texts, but also many occasional essays not yet translated into English. Tracing Eco's intellectual development from early studies in medieval aesthetics to seminal works on popular culture, postmodern fiction, and semiotic theory, he shows how Eco's own fiction grows out of his literary and cultural theories. Bondanella cites all texts in English, and provides a full bibliography of works by and about Eco.

The first comprehensive study in English of Umberto Eco's theories and fictions.
Reviews
"Peter Bondanella's Umberto Eco and the Open Text, an extremely intelligent, well-researched monograph and the most lucid study on Umberto Eco to date, was certainly well worth the wait. Peter Bondanella's study of Umberto Eco is a invaluable guide for anyone who wishes to understand and appreciate one of the wittiest and most erudite, intelligent, and entertaining intellectuals of our time." Rocco Capozzi, World Literature Today
"Bondanella's book amounts to a masterful sketch of Italian and Western intellectual history from the early 1950's to the present." The Comparatist



Book Information
ISBN 9780521020879
Author Peter Bondanella
Format Paperback
Page Count 236
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 312g
Dimensions(mm) 215mm * 139mm * 18mm