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In this volume, Alessandro Grazi offers the first intellectual biography of the Italian Jewish writer and politician David Levi (1816-1898). In this intriguing journey through the mysterious rites of Freemasonry and the bizarre worldviews of Saint-Simonianism, you can discover Levi’s innovative interpretation of Judaism and its role in modernity. As a champion of dialogue with Catholic intellectuals, Levi’s importance transcends the Jewish world. The second part of the book presents an unpublished document, Levi’s comedy “Il Mistero delle Tre Melarancie”, a phantasmagorical adventure in search of his Jewish identity, with an English translation of its most relevant excerpt.
Post-Unification Italy saw an unprecedented rise of the middle classes, an expansion in the production of print culture, and increased access to education and professions for women, particularly in urban areas. Although there was still widespread illiteracy, especially among women in both rural and urban areas, there emerged a generation of women writers whose domestic fiction and journalism addressed a growing female readership. This study looks at the work of three of the most significant women writers of the period: La Marchesa Colombi, Neera, and Matilde Serao. These writers, whose works had been largely forgotten for much of the last century, only to be rediscovered by the Italian femin...
This book examines the processes involved in writing the lives of women, both as autobiographies and as biographies. Some essays are theoretical discussions about the constructions of self-articulation in women's life writing. Others are more autobiographical, emphasizing the importance of self-articulation for creating possibilities for self-direction. Adopting different theoretical approaches, chapters in this collection highlight the connections between subjectivity and history, feminist concerns about mothering and the mother-daughter relationships, autobiography, discourse and its framing of the relationship between text and life, and the ethics of constructing biographies. The book is divided into three parts: the first part focuses on the process of writing lives as expressed but also contested in epistolary narratives, autobiography and historical fiction. The second part considers notions of female genealogy and the relationship with the maternal, both biological and symbolic. The third part comprises articles which deal with writing outside geographical and metaphorical borders.
Set in recently unified Italy, the narrative of Emotional Arenas is driven by a failed marriage, the wife's scandalous affair with a circus artiste, and the illicit couple's murder of the hapless husband. Imaginative reading of the criminal prosecution records and newspaper coverage allows reconstruction of the emotional experiences of this story.
This book explores women’s editorial and salon activities in Southern Europe and provides a comparative view of their practices. It argues that women in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece used their double role as editors and salonnières to engage with foreign cultures, launch the careers of promising young authors and advocate for modernization and social change. By examining a neglected body of periodicals edited between 1860 and 1920, this book sets out to explore women’s editorial agendas and their interest in creating a connection between salon life and the print press. What purpose did this connection serve? How did women editors use their periodicals and their salons to create opp...
For observers of the European film scene, Federico Fellini’s death in 1993 came to stand for the demise of Italian cinema as a whole. Exploring an eclectic sampling of works from the new millennium, Italian Film in the Present Tense confronts this narrative of decline with strong evidence to the contrary. Millicent Marcus highlights Italian cinema’s new sources of industrial strength, its re-placement of the Rome-centred studio system with regional film commissions, its contemporary breakthroughs on the aesthetic front, and its vital engagement with the changing economic and socio-political circumstances in twenty-first-century Italian life. Examining works that stand out for their forma...
Women writers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy reinvigorated the modern epistolary novel through their re-fashioning of the genre as a tool for examining women's roles and experiences. Addressing the Letter argues that many epistolary novels purposely tie narrative structure to thematic content, creating in the process powerful texts that reflect and challenge literary and socio-cultural norms. Through the lens of the genre, Laura A. Salsini considers how the works of authors including the Marchesa Colombi, Sibilla Aleramo, Gianna Manzini, Natalia Ginzburg, and Oriana Fallaci highlight such issues as love, the loss of ideals, lack of communication and connection, and feminist ideology. She also analyses what may be the first woman-authored Italian example of epistolary fiction: Orintia Romagnuoli Sacrati's Lettere di Giulia Willet (1818). In their reworking of the epistolary narrative form, Italian women writers challenged dominant assumptions about female behaviours, roles, relationships, and sexuality in modern Italy.
This volume of essays discusses the European and global expansion of Italian opera and the significance of this process for debates on opera at home in Italy. Covering different parts of Europe, the Americas, Southeast and East Asia, it investigates the impact of transnational musical exchanges on notions of national identity associated with the production and reception of Italian opera across the world. As a consequence of these exchanges between composers, impresarios, musicians and audiences, ideas of operatic Italianness (italianit...) constantly changed and had to be reconfigured, reflecting the radically transformative experience of time and space that throughout the nineteenth century turned opera into a global aesthetic commodity. The book opens with a substantial introduction discussing key concepts in cross-disciplinary perspective and concludes with an epilogue relating its findings to different historiographical trends in transnational opera studies.
“Lost Bread adds an essential chapter to the literature of the Holocaust. With a broad transnational sweep, it recounts a refugee's search for a new home, from country to country, until finally settling in Italy. In this elegant translation, the voice of Edith Bruck—Italy's most important witness together with Primo Levi—reaches the English reader with all its poignance and raw emotional power.” —Michael F. Moore, translator of The Drowned and the Saved, by Primo Levi, and The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni Drawing on the remarkable events of her own life, renowned author and Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck tells the story of Ditke, a young Jewish girl living in Hungary during Wor...
Author of more than thirteen books and several volumes of poetry, screenwriter, and director, Edith Bruck is one of the leading literary voices in Italy, attracting increasing attention in the English-speaking world not least for her powerful Holocaust testimony, which is often compared with the work of her contemporaries Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani. Born in Hungary in 1932, she was deported with her family to the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, Christianstadt, Landsberg, and Bergen-Belsen, where she lost both her parents and a brother. After the war, she traveled widely until 1954 when she settled in Rome. She has lived there ever since. This important new study is motivated by...