From Rabelais's celebration of wine to Proust'smadeleineand Virginia Woolf'sboeuf en daubeinTo the Lighthouse, food has figured prominently in world literature. But perhaps nowhere has it played such ...a vital role as in the Italian novel. In a book flowing with descriptions of recipes, ingredients, fragrances, country gardens, kitchens, dinner etiquette, and even hunger, Gian-Paolo Biasin examines food images in the modern Italian novel so as to unravel their function and meaning. As a sign for cultural values and social and economic relationships, food becomes a key to appreciating the textual richness of works such as Lampedusa'sThe Leopard, Manzoni'sThe Betrothed, Primo Levi'sSurvival in Auschwitz, and Calvino'sUnder the Jaguar Sun. The importance of the culinary sign in fiction, argues Biasin, is that it embodies the oral relationship between food and language while creating a sense of materiality. Food contributes powerfully to the reality of a text by making a fictional setting seem credible and coherent: a Lombard peasant eatspolentainThe Betrothed, whereas a Sicilian prince offers a monumentalmacaroni timbaleat a dinner inThe Leopard. Similarly, Biasin shows how food is used by writers to connote the psychological traits of a character, to construct a story by making the protagonists meet during a meal, and even to call attention to the fictionality of the story with a metanarrative description. Drawing from anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology, science, and philosophy, the author gives special attention to the metaphoric and symbolic meanings of food. Throughout he blends material culture with observations on thematics and narrativity to enlighten the reader who enjoys the pleasures of the text as much as those of the palate.
Originally published in .
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian literature, Gian-Paolo Biasin explores a series of challenges posited for literary criticism by the success of semiotics, testing theoretical ...concepts not so much on theoretical grounds as in their practical application to literary texts from the high Romantic lyric of Ugo Foscolo to the postmodern, cosmicomic" tales of Italo Calvino.
Originally published in 1985.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Integrating the study of both music and art into an exploration of the early poetry of Eugenio Montale (1896-1982), this book situates Italy's premier poet of the twentieth century within the ...Modernist movement. Gian-Paolo Biasin finds in Montale's poetry broad resonances, reverberations, and comparisons that involve it in the European culture of its time and that invite the reading of poetry, music, and painting as texts in a cultural system. This interdisciplinary approach expands our appreciation of Montale's work in a way not possible with literary analysis alone.
Biasin's study first shows the structural homology between some of Debussy's preludes for piano and certain poems in Montale's Ossi di seppia, emphasizing the rhythmic qualities of the compositions. This formal analysis leads to an understanding of the respective texts' thematic, symbolic, and cultural meaning--specifically, antiheroism as a choice of life. Similar methodology is then used to reveal the relationship between the poetry of Montale and Giorgio Morandi's etchings and between Montale's poetic persona, Arsenio, and the novelistic characters of Svevo and Pirandello. Each of these comparisons brings to light a shared image, that of the clown (or antihero) as a mocking self-portrait of the modern artist.
Originally published in 1990.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Disease—real or imagined, physical or mental—is a common theme in Western literature and is often a symbol of modern alienation. In Literary Diseases, a comprehensive analysis of the metaphorical and ...symbolic force of disease in modern Italian literature, Gian-Paolo Biasin expands the geography of the discussion of this important theme. Using as a backdrop the perspective of European experiences of the previous hundred years, Biasin analyzes the theme of disease as a reflection of certain sociological and historical phenomena in modern European novels, as a metaphor for the world visions of selected Italian novelists, and especially as a vehicle for understanding the nature and function of fiction itself. The core of Biasin’s study is found in his discussion of the works of four major Italian writers. In his criticism of the novels of Giovanni Verga, who stood at the center of many complex developments in the nineteenth century, he examines the antecedents of modern Italian prose. He then scrutinizes the works of Italo Svevo and Luigi Pirandello, who together inaugurated the modern novel in Italy. Of particular interest is his exploration of their critical use of psychoanalysis and madness climaxed by apocalyptic visions. He then discusses the prose of Carlo Emilio Gadda, which epitomizes the problems of the avant-garde in its experimentalism and expressionism. Biasin utilizes a broad spectrum of critical approaches—from sociology, psychoanalysis, and different trends in modern French, American, and Italian literary criticism—in shaping his own methodology, which is a thematic and structural symbolism. He concludes that disease in literature should be considered as a metaphor for writing (écriture) and as a cognitive instrument that calls into question the anthropocentric values of Western culture. The book, with its textual comparisons and unusual supporting examples, constitutes a significant methodological contribution as well as a major survey of modern Italian prose, and will allow the reader to see traditional landmarks in European fiction in a new light.
Luigi Pirandello Biasin, Gian-Paolo; Gieri, Manuela
Luigi Pirandello,
c1999, 19990120, 1999, 2000, 1999-01-01
eBook
Essays discuss the texts of Luigi Pirandello, one of the literary giants of this century and present an up-to-date re-evaluations of Pirandello's works, including his poetry, novels, short stories, ...plays, essays, letters, and memoirs.
How to Make a Stew Biasin, Gian-Paolo
The Flavors of Modernity,
03/2017
Book Chapter
Hunger remained constantly in the background ofI promessi sposi, and in the famine episode it was a determining element of the narration even though it did not affect the protagonists closely. On the ...contrary, in Giovanni Verga’sI Malavoglia(1881), it becomes the daily and obsessive concern, the human and historical condition with which its characters must struggle.
In an essay that does not seem to have received due attention in Italy, Sergio Campailla examines the enormous importance held in Verga’s work and world view by the body and its inherent alimentary function. Starting from an analysis of a
I hope the reader will not consider a chapter on Primo Levi and the experience of the Nazi Lagers as inappropriate or even irrelevant for the subject of this book. On the contrary, as I have briefly ...said in the introduction, I believe that to examine the themes of hunger and the humanness-civilization of food in exceptional, extreme historical circumstances and settings is absolutely essential and deserves more than superficial attention. In fact, such an examination implies putting aside the pleasure principle, which is so easily connected with alimentary matters, and focusing on the other fundamental principle, need—thereby foregrounding
The Juice of the Story Biasin, Gian-Paolo
The Flavors of Modernity,
03/2017
Book Chapter
A rereading of the Italian novelsub specie culinariamust begin with the fountainhead of the genre, Alessandro Manzoni’sI promessi sposi, which was soon compared by Wolfgang Goethe to “a good fruit in ...its full ripeness”¹—an excellent auspice for my critical project. As a novel,I promessi sposiis certainly “a work combining history and invention,” but it is perhaps worth pausing a moment on what type of history Manzoni had in mind.
With his interest in the study of economic and social phenomena, and in particular of mass psychology and the customs of the people juxtaposed with
A Wise Gourmet Biasin, Gian-Paolo
The Flavors of Modernity,
03/2017
Book Chapter
A gourmet and curious reader, wandering through the textual universe of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’sIl Gattopardoand searching for good food or even some delicacy, will not be disappointed. After ...the frustrations caused by D’Annunzio’s ideological and communicative strategies, and perhaps after feeling his/her mouth watering through the first chapter of Antonio Fogazzaro’sPiccolo mondo antico, with that aroma of truffles alternatively asserted and questioned, preparing the way for a northern, noble risotto, this hypothetical reader will find satisfaction for his/her appetite in the Sicily of the Leopard.
Beginning to whet this appetite, I could start by saying that
