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"The central importance of the actor-author is a distinctive feature of Italian theatrical life, in all its eclectic range of regional cultures and artistic traditions. The fascination of the figure is that he or she stands on both sides of one of theatre's most important power relationships: between the exhilarating freedom of performance and the austere restriction of authorship and the written text. This broad-ranging volume brings together critical essays on the role of the actor-author, spanning the period from the Renaissance to the present. Starting with Castiglione, Ruzante and the commedia dell'arte, and surveying the works of Dario Fo, De Filippo and Bene, among others, the contributors cast light on a tradition which continues into Neapolitan and Sicilian theatre today, and in Italy's currently fashionable 'narrative theatre', where the actor-author is centre stage in a solo performance."
No other European country experienced the disruption of political and everyday life suffered by Italy in the so-called 'years of lead' (1969-c.1983), when there were more than 12,000 incidents of terrorist violence. This experience affected all aspects of Italian cultural life, shaping political, judicial and everyday language as well as artistic representation of every kind. In this innovative and broad-ranging study, experts from the fields of philosophy, history, media, law, cinema, theatre and literary studies trace how the experience and legacies of terrorism have determined the form and content of Italian cultural production and shaped the country's way of thinking about such events?
A history of Italian theatre from its origins to the the time of this book's publication in 2006. The text discusses the impact of all the elements and figures integral to the collaborative process of theatre-making. The distinctive nature of Italian theatre is expressed in the individual chapters by highly regarded international scholars.
An authoritative reference covering primarily actors, playwrights, directors, styles and movements, companies and organizations.
This book is the first scholarly analysis that considers the specificity of situated experiences of the maternal from a variety of theoretical perspectives. From “Fertility Day” to “Family Day,” the concept of motherhood has been at the center of the public debate in contemporary Italy, partly in response to the perceived crisis of the family, the economic crisis, and the crisis of national identity, provoked by the forces of globalization and migration, secularization, and the instability of labor markets. Through essays by an international cohort of established and emerging scholars, this volume aims to read these shifts in cinematic terms. How does Italian cinema represent, negotiate, and elaborate changing definitions of motherhood in narrative, formal, and stylistic terms? The essays in this volume focus on the figures of working mothers, women who opt for a child-free adulthood, single mothers, ambivalent mothers, lost mothers, or imperfect mothers, who populate contemporary screen narratives.
Investigating the interrelationships between orality and writing in elite and popular textual culture in early modern Italy, this volume shows how the spoken or sung word on the one hand, and manuscript or print on the other hand, could have interdependent or complementary roles to play in the creation and circulation of texts. The first part of the book centres on performances, ranging from realizations of written texts to improvisations or semi-improvisations that might draw on written sources and might later be committed to paper. Case studies examine the poems sung in the piazza that narrated contemporary warfare, commedia dell'arte scenarios, and the performative representation of the d...
The intellectual societies known as Academies played a vital role in the development of culture, and scholarly debate throughout Italy between 1525-1700. They were fundamental in establishing the intellectual networks later defined as the ‘République des Lettres’, and in the dissemination of ideas in early modern Europe, through print, manuscript, oral debate and performance. This volume surveys the social and cultural role of Academies, challenging received ideas and incorporating recent archival findings on individuals, networks and texts. Ranging over Academies in both major and smaller or peripheral centres, these collected studies explore the interrelationships of Academies with ot...
As a new digital era increasingly impacts on the 'age of print', we are ever more conscious of the way in which information is packaged and received. The influence of the material form on the reading process was no less important during the gradual shift from manuscript to early print culture. Focusing on the physical structure and presentation of manuscripts and printed books containing texts by one of the most influential authors of the medieval period, Rhiannon Daniels traces the evolving social, cultural, and economic profile of Boccaccio's readership and the scribes and printers who laboured to reproduce three of his works: the Teseida , Decameron , and De mulieribus claris . Rhiannon Daniels is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Italian at the University of Leeds.
"Eduardo De Filippo (1900-1984) e uno dei maggiori drammaturghi del novecento. Nel suo teatro, la famiglia rappresenta il punto nevralgico della societa. Attraverso quest'unita archetipica, le opere qui considerate si propongono come un lungo esame dei rapporti familiari e sono, al contempo, il barometro dei mutamenti sociali e culturali delle diverse epoche in cui si svolge l'azione. In questo nuovo lavoro, Donatella Fischer analizza ogni commedia come un ulteriore passo verso l'inarrestabile frantumazione dell'universo familiare e, soprattutto, della famiglia patriarcale i cui precetti si rivelano sempre piu anacronistici. Eduardo De Filippo ritrae famiglie divise dal conflitto fra illusione e realta (Natale in casa Cupiello), aggrappate alla speranza (Napoli Milionaria! e Questi fantasmi!), sovversive dietro la cornice borghese (Filumena Marturano), in balia del proprio tempo (Mia famiglia) e ridotte infine all'involucro di se stesse nell'ultima opera dell'autoreGli esami non finiscono mai."
This volume brings together specialists from a variety of disciplines to develop a deeper understanding of the social, political, and cultural history of women in Italy in the years 1946-1960. Despite being a time when women and the family were at the center of national debates, and when society changed considerably, the fifteen years following the Second World War have tended to be overlooked or subsumed into discussions of other periods. By focusing on the experience of women and by broadening the frame of reference to include subjects and sources often ignored, or only alluded to, by traditional analyses, the essays in this volume break new ground and provide a corrective to previous interpretive models.