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Transnational Italian Studies is specifically targeted at a student audience and is designed to be used as a key text when approaching the disciplinary field of Italian studies. It allows the study of Italian culture to be construed and practised not simply as the inquiry into a national tradition but as the study of the interaction of cultural practices both within Italy itself and in those parts of the world that have witnessed the extent of Italian mobility. The text argues that Italian culture needs to be considered in a transnational/transcultural perspective and that an understanding of linguistic and cultural translation underlies all approaches to the study of Italian culture in a gl...
After classical antiquity, the Italian Renaissance raised the portrait, whether literary or pictorial, to the status of an important art form. Among sixteenth-century Renaissance painters, Titian made his reputation, and much of his living, by portraiture. Titian's portraits were promoted by his friend, Pietro Aretino, an eminent poet and critic, who addressed his letters and sonnets to the same personages whom Titian portrayed. In many of these letters (which often included sonnets), Aretino described both an individual patron and Titian's portrait of that patron, thus stimulating the reciprocal relation between a verbal and pictorial portrait. By investigating this unprecedented historical...
When Benito Mussolini proclaimed that "Cinema is the strongest weapon," he was telling only half the story. In reality, very few feature films during the Fascist period can be labeled as propaganda. Re-viewing Fascism considers the many films that failed as "weapons" in creating cultural consensus and instead came to reflect the complexities and contradictions of Fascist culture. The volume also examines the connection between cinema of the Fascist period and neorealism—ties that many scholars previously had denied in an attempt to view Fascism as an unfortunate deviation in Italian history. The postwar directors Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio de Sica all had important roots in the Fascist era, as did the Venice Film Festival. While government censorship loomed over Italian filmmaking, it did not prevent frank depictions of sexuality and representations of men and women that challenged official gender policies. Re-viewing Fascism brings together scholars from different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds as it offers an engaging and innovative look into Italian cinema, Fascist culture, and society.
The Italian educator and physician Maria Montessori is best known for the teaching method that bears her name, but historian Erica Moretti reframes Montessori's work, showing that pacifism was the foundation of her pioneering efforts in psychiatry and pedagogy.
A collection of critical essays on the noted postwar Italian director includes pieces that examine his works from a range of social and political perspectives to consider his motivations and impact on modern film. Simultaneous.
First published in 1999. The many available scholarly works on Italian-Americans are perhaps of little practical help to the undergraduate or high school student who needs background information when reading contemporary fiction with Italian characters, watching films that require a familiarity with Italian Americans, or looking at works of art that can be fully appreciated only if one understands Italian culture. This basic reference work for non-specialists and students offers quick insights and essential, easy-to-grasp information on Italian-American contributions to American art, music, literature, motion pictures and cultural life. This rich legacy is examined in a collection of origina...
Contextualizing Michelangelo’s poetry and spirituality within the framework of the religious Zeitgeist of his era, this study investigates his poetic production to shed new light on the artist’s religious beliefs and unique language of art. Author Ambra Moroncini looks first and foremost at Michelangelo the poet and proposes a thought-provoking reading of Michelangelo’s most controversial artistic production between 1536 and c.1550: The Last Judgment, his devotional drawings made for Vittoria Colonna, and his last frescoes for the Pauline Chapel. Using theological and literary analyses which draw upon reformist and Protestant scriptural writings, as well as on Michelangelo’s own rime spirituali and Vittoria Colonna’s spiritual lyrics, Moroncini proposes a compelling argument for the impact that the Reformation had on one of the greatest minds of the Italian Renaissance. It brings to light how, in the second quarter of the sixteenth century in Italy, Michelangelo’s poetry and aesthetic conception were strongly inspired by the revived theologia crucis of evangelical spirituality, rather than by the theologia gloriae of Catholic teaching.
Stelio Cro’s revealing work, arising from his more than half dozen previous books, considers the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in the context of the European experience with, and reaction to, the cultures of America’s original inhabitants. Taking into account Spanish, Italian, French, and English sources, the author describes how the building materials for Rousseau’s allegory of the Noble Savage came from the early Spanish chroniclers of the discovery and conquest of America, the Jesuit Relations of the Paraguay Missions (a Utopia in its own right), the Essais of Montaigne, Italian Humanism, Shakespeare’s Tempest, writers of Spain’s Golden Age, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and the European philosophes.
Pietro Aretino's literary influence was felt throughout most of Europe during the sixteenth-century, yet English-language criticism of this writer's work and persona has hitherto been sparse. Raymond B. Waddington's study redresses this oversight, drawing together literary and visual arts criticism in its examination of Aretino's carefully cultivated scandalous persona - a persona created through his writings, his behaviour and through a wide variety of visual arts and crafts. In the Renaissance, it was believed that satire originated from satyrs. The satirist Aretino promoted himself as a satyr, the natural being whose sexuality guarantees its truthfulness. Waddington shows how Aretino's ow...