Niccolò Machiavelli has been often associated with Stoicism, Humanism, and Civicism; however, none of these philosophies has offered a completely satisfactory account of how segretario’s worldview ...emerges in his political and literary works. The present dissertation addresses the matter of the underlying metaphysical perspective that informs Machiavelli’s writing by posing, and responding, to three main questions: 1) What is the role of rhetoric in Machiavelli’s works and how does his peculiar use of language relate to his political ideas? 2) What kind of philosophical tenets better explain his political positions? and 3) Can Epicureanism be deemed the main attitude that influenced his thinking? Allison Brown’s tracking of the influence of De Rerum Natura on Renaissance Florence has stimulated new interest in the role of Epicureanism in Machiavelli’s written works. A few scholars have identified in some parts of Machiavelli’s texts the influence of Lucretian philosophy; however, none has attempted to provide a comprehensive account of what Machiavelli’s writing owes to Epicurean philosophy. This dissertation explores the Epicurean ideas that form the core of Machiavellian poetics. By focusing on this connection between philosophy and rhetoric, I aim at exposing how his distinctive use of language aligns with the radicalism of some of his political ideas. In doing so, I adopt the critical methods of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, naturalistic and atheistic ideas that informed both Machiavelli and his Latin source, Lucretius. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari offer an interpretation of desire as a concept that suitably maps onto the distinctive nature of power in Machiavelli’s writing. The results of the present research reveal the undeniable presence of Lucretian philosophy in several of Machiavelli’s most important literary works, including The Prince (De Principatibus, or Il principe,1513), Discorsi sulla Prima Deca di Tito Livio (1515-19), Mandragola (1518), Clizia (1524), and L’Asino (1518). Moreover, such evidence gives us a more nuanced account of Machiavelli’s originality. His materialist approach to life and his emphasis on the role of conflict and desire in the political realm find a fitting collocation in the atomist, chaotic universe described by Lucretius in his didactic poem.
This dissertation considers the acts of rereading, rewriting, and reusing as a literary praxis rooted in feminist politics that resonates across cultural texts—explicitly feminist and ...otherwise—written by women in Italy between the late 1960s and early 1980s. Unlike other eras, artistic movements, or cultural trends in which writers and artists deconstructed and reconstituted earlier models as the basis of new work, the period of burgeoning feminist thought and activity gave rise to cultural works that drew unique inspiration from auto/biographical reflection and mutual, collective, or personal recognition. Positioned at an intersection of Italian feminist thought, twentieth century intellectual history, and literary analysis, my dissertation identifies a pattern linking feminist thought to literary production that has not been identified elsewhere. The practice of reuse as critique is a unifying factor that I link to a feminist artistic and political practice, even when the authors or works do not present a political message or content addressing feminism. I analyze four texts written by female authors with diverse influences and aims, working during the era of social tumult and ideological reorganization between 1969 and 1983, roughly the heyday of neofemminismo in Italy: Carla Lonzi’s oral history Autoritratto (1969), Adele Cambria’s epistolary analysis and play Amore come rivoluzione (1976), Natalia Ginzburg’s novelistic biography La famiglia Manzoni (1983), and Anna Maria Ortese’s autobiographical novel Il porto di Toledo (1975). The strategies these texts deploy all engage with what I will refer to as interventionary reading, in which the author as reading and writing subject actively intercedes in the narration and often reflects upon or alludes to its process of construction. In these works, reuse figures as a means of negotiating a conflicted relationship to the past through intertextual encounter and revision that replies to and expands on feminist thought.
"Vertical Readings in Danteâ s Comedy is a reappraisal of the poem by an international team of thirty-four scholars. Each vertical reading analyses three same-numbered cantos from the three ...canticles: Inferno i, Purgatorio i and Paradiso i; Inferno ii, Purgatorio ii and Paradiso ii; etc. Although scholars have suggested before that there are correspondences between same-numbered cantos that beg to be explored, this is the first time that the approach has been pursued in a systematic fashion across the poem. This collection â to be issued in three volumes â offers an unprecedented repertoire of vertical readings for the whole poem. As the first volume exemplifies, vertical reading not only articulates unexamined connections between the three canticles but also unlocks engaging new ways to enter into core concerns of the poem. The three volumes thereby provide an indispensable resource for scholars, students and enthusiasts of Dante."
‘Anticlassicisms’ react to the various forms of ‘classicisms.’ This volume discusses the history and possible implications of the label in Renaissance studies and analyzes such ‘anticlassicisms.’ It ...distinguishes the various forms of opposition to ‘classicisms’ as to their scope (on a scale between radical poetological dissension to merely sectorial opposition in a given literary genre) and to their alternative models, be they authors or texts.
‚Antiklassizismen‘ reagieren auf unterschiedliche Formen von ‚Klassizismen.‘ Der Band untersucht die Geschichte und die möglichen Implikationen dieses Terminus für die Renaissanceforschung und analysiert zugleich solche ‚Antiklassizismen.‘ Er unterscheidet ihre unterschiedlich gearteten Gegenstellungen zu ‚Klassizismen‘ hinsichtlich ihrer Reichweite (auf einer Skala zwischen radikaler poetologischer Opposition und lediglich sektorialer Abweichung innerhalb einer Gattung) und hinsichtlich der je angesetzten Alternativmodelle, seien diese Autoren oder Texte.
This comparative Polish-Italian study explores the comic potential of metafiction, and illustrates it with the examples drawn from drama works of Luigi Pirandello and Witold Gombrowicz. It is the ...first publication which juxtaposes this aspect of both writers’ works, and the theoretical model elaborated by the author allows reading works by other authors in this context.
This essay focuses on the fascinating case of Juó Bananére, a comic writer of the Italian diaspora in Brazil, to propose an experiment in how literary historians might conceive of Italian Literature ...from perspectives immanent to Italy’s various global interactions. By approaching Bananére, a non-Italian, outside of Italy, who chose to write as though he were Italian, in a language only an Italian immigrant could have realistically spoken, this essay offers one such perspective.
In this groundbreaking study, unique in English, Joseph Luzzi considers Italian Romanticism and the modern myth of Italy. Ranging across European and international borders, he examines the metaphors, ...facts, and fictions about Italy that were born in the Romantic age and continue to haunt the global literary imagination.
The themes of the book include the emergence of Italy as the "world's university" (Goethe) and "mother of arts" (Byron), the influence of Dante'sCommediaon Romantic autobiography, and the representation of the Italian body politic as a woman at home and abroad. Luzzi also provides a critical reevaluation of the three crowns of Italian Romantic letters-Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, and Alessandro Manzoni-profoundly influential writers largely undiscovered in Anglo-American criticism. Reaching out to academic and general readers alike, the book offers fresh insights into the influence of Italian literary, cultural, and intellectual traditions on the foreign imagination from the Romantic age to the present.
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