Drawing upon poststructuralist theories of nationalism and national identity developed by such writers as Etienne Balibar, Emmanuel Levinas, Julia Kristeva, Antonio Negri, and Slavoj Zizek, noted ...Renaissance scholar William J. Kennedy argues that the Petrarchan sonnet serves as a site for early modern expressions of national sentiment in Italy, France, England, Spain, and Germany. Kennedy pursues this argument through historical research into Renaissance commentaries on Petrarch's poetry and critical studies of such poets as Lorenzo de' Medici, Joachim du Bellay and the Pléiade brigade, Philip and Mary Sidney, and Mary Wroth.
Kennedy begins with a survey of Petrarch's poetry and its citation in Italy, explaining how major commentators tried to present Petrarch as a spokesperson for competing versions of national identity. He then shows how Petrarch's model helped define social class, political power, and national identity in mid-sixteenth-century France, particularly in the nationalistic sonnet cycles of Joachim Du Bellay. Finally, Kennedy discusses how Philip Sidney and his sister Mary and niece Mary Wroth reworked Petrarch's model to secure their family's involvement in forging a national policy under Elizabeth I and James I .
Treating the subject of early modern national expression from a broad comparative perspective, The Site of Petrarchism will be of interest to scholars of late medieval and early modern literature in Europe, historians of culture, and critical theorists.
What do Cesare Pavese, Beppe Fenoglio and Primo Levi have in common? Apart from their obvious Piedmontese origins, they and other writers coming from this Italian region share a certain tendency ...towards multilingualism, which is a characteristic that has not been comprehensively investigated over the years. This study presents a linguistic analysis of a group of modern and contemporary narratives written by Piedmontese authors. The novels and short stories here examined are notable for the intriguing way in which they move between a variety of idioms - Standard Italian, regional vernaculars, English and pastiches (with rare excursions into French). With the support of linguistic and philosophical theories on the relation between identity, alterity and language, the book demonstrates how the use of non-standard parlances is fundamental in both reinforcing the sense of belonging to specific social groups and highlighting the presence of dissimilar identities and 'other' cultures. A sociolinguistic study and an analysis of the political and historical context of the region are also provided in order to illustrate how the combination of different varieties in literature reflects the region's peripheral position, as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in Piedmont since the nineteenth century. This book fills a notable gap, and casts new light on Piedmontese literature.
Francesco Fulvio Frugoni, the leading figure of the conceptist prose, has proved to have an encyclopedic knowledge of aphorisms and exempla coming from heterogeneous sources. This paper offers a ...parallel between late-Renaissance mnemonic techniques and Frugoni’s recurring quotations which have been organized into well-defined moral themes. The aim of this paper is to deduce constant stylistic features which will in turn offer a new perspective on the erudite arabesques of Frugoni’s writing. The mentioned parallel starts from a meticulous analysis of the structure and quotations included in a chapter of his Ritratti critici (1669).
Between the seventies and eighties of the twentieth century Franco Fortini was called to teach the history of literary criticism at the university. Of this experience, capital in the definition of ...his intellectual parable, we have many preparatory materials for the courses and seminars preserved in the fund dedicated to him of the Humanistic Library of the University of Siena. These are texts of considerable importance, whose themes intersect in a decisive way with the essayistic and poetic reflections that Fortini develops in the same years. This volume, for the first time, offers the transcription of these documents, rearranging and integrating them in order to offer the reader real critical essays on literature and society hitherto unknown.
Giovanni Boccaccio played a pivotal role in the extraordinary emergence of the Italian literary tradition in the fourteenth century, not only as author of the Decameron, but also as scribe of Dante, ...Petrarch and Cavalcanti. Using a single codex written entirely in Boccaccio's hand, Martin Eisner brings together material philology and literary history to reveal the multiple ways Boccaccio authorizes this vernacular literary tradition. Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of Boccaccio as a biographer, storyteller, editor and scribe, who constructs arguments, composes narratives, compiles texts and manipulates material forms to legitimize and advance a vernacular literary canon. Situating these philological activities in the context of Boccaccio's broader reflections on poetry in the Decameron and the Genealogy of the Gentile Gods, the book produces a new portrait of Boccaccio that integrates his vernacular and Latin works, while also providing a new context for understanding his fictions.
As an investigation of new expressive processes and stylistic experiences, The Invention of Modern Italian Literature situates prominent Italian writers within the context of modern literature.
This dissertation argues that Calvino as a fantastic author cannot be confined to a specific period—the 1960s—but must be understood in relation to his entire literary production. Past and present ...critics have not offered a comprehensive reading of Calvino’s narrative techniques with a focus on the fantastic. This study shows how pervasive the fantastic mode is in Calvino’s literary works as they engage other themes and motivations such as environmental issues or formal and structural solutions such as combinatory narrative and metanarrative.The present study reconsiders the ways in which literary critics have traditionally read Calvino as a protean writer who took up numerous genres and argues that Calvino is, in fact, a full-fledged author in the fantastic mode. The fantastic mode grants continuity to Calvino’s works, although with different degrees of emphasis, according to the author’s periods of productivity.This dissertation is comprised of three chapters, in addition to an Introduction and a Conclusion. The Introduction outlines the status of the theoretical and critical works concerning Calvino’s narrative in relation to the topics discussed in the dissertation, with the fantastic mode being the most prominent. The first chapter aims at highlighting the fantastic as a dominant strategy utilized by Calvino, with the goal of changing how literary critics have typically viewed the writer. The second chapter demonstrates the presence of the fantastic mode in the author’s novels, traditionally perceived as realistic, while considering the issues related to man’s relationship with nature and the consequences of environmental problems plaguing modern society. Finally, through an analysis of Calvino’s later novels, the third chapter explores the close link that exists between combinatory literature and metanarrative, on the one hand, and the fantastic mode, on the other. The Conclusion points out the different avenues where this research might take Calvino’s narrative as well as the directions that writing in the fantastic mode pursued after Calvino.
This innovative contribution to understanding the promise and contradictions of contemporary postcolonial culture applies a wide array of theoretical tools to a large body of literature. The author ...compares the work of established Indian writers including Bharati Mukherjee, Meena Alexander, Sara Suleri, and Sunetra Gupta to new writings by such Afro-Italian immigrant women as Ermina dell’Oro, Maria Abbebù Viarengo, Ribka Sibhatu, and Sirad Hassan. Sandra Ponzanesi’s analysis highlights a set of dissymmetrical relationships that are set in the context of different imperial, linguistic, and market policies. By dealing with issues of representation linked to postcolonial literary genres, to gender and ethnicity questions, and to new cartographies of diaspora, this book imbues the postcolonial debate with a new élan.
