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Italian cinema is internationally well-known for the ground-breaking experience of Neo-Realism, comedy "Italian-Style," Spaghetti Westerns, and the horror movies of the seventies. However, what is rather unfamiliar to wider audiences is Italian cinema's crucial and enduring affair with literature. In fact, since the very beginning, literature has deeply influenced how Italian cinema has defined itself and grown. This book provides an empirical approach to this complex and fruitful relationship. The aim is to present discussions dealing with significant Italian film adaptations from literary materials which greatly exemplify the variety of styles, view-points, and attitudes produced by such an alliance, throughout the different periods. Among the adaptations discussed, are those that have followed trends and critical debates, making them, at times, rather problematic.
This innovative study explores how interpretations of religious art change when it is moved into a secular context.
Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante presents new research by international scholars on the themes of ethics, politics and justice in the works of Dante Alighieri, including chapters on Dante’s modern ‘afterlife’. Together the chapters explore how Dante’s writings engage with the contemporary culture of medieval Florence and Italy, and how and why his political and moral thought still speaks compellingly to modern readers. The collection’s contributors range across different disciplines and scholarly traditions – history, philology, classical reception, philosophy, theology – to scrutinise Dante’s Divine Comedy and his other works in Italian and Latin, offering a multi-facet...
Reveals changes in Ezra Pound's prose writing resulting from his excitement over Mussolini's use of Italian cultural heritage to build and promote the modern Fascist state. Drawing on unpublished archival material and untranslated periodical contributions, the author delves into the vexing work of perhaps the most famous, certainly the most notorious, American in Italy in the 1930s and 1940s, providing fresh understanding of Fascist deployment of art, architecture, blockbuster exhibitions, music, archaeological projects, urban design,a nd literature. Pound's prose writings of this period cement a "directive" approach - declaiming his views with an authority that shuts down disagreement. This work reveals the importance of this approach to his larger artistic mission.
The Oxford Handbook of Dante contains forty-four specially written chapters that provide a thorough and creative reading of Dante's oeuvre. It gathers an intergenerational and international team of scholars encompassing diverse approaches from the fields of Anglo-American, Italian, and continental scholarship and spanning several disciplines: philology, material culture, history, religion, art history, visual studies, theory from the classical to the contemporary, queer, post- and de-colonial, and feminist studies. The volume combines a rigorous reassessment of Dante's formation, themes, and sources, with a theoretically up-to-date focus on textuality, thereby offering a new critical Dante. ...
In Dante's Journey to Polyphony, Francesco Ciabattoni's erudite analysis sheds light on Dante's use of music in the Divine Comedy. Following the work's musical evolution, Ciabattoni moves from the cacophony of Inferno through the monophony of Purgatory, to the polyphony of Paradise and argues that Dante's use of sacred songs constitutes a thoroughly planned system. Particular types of music accompany the pilgrim's itinerary and reflect medieval theories regarding sound and the sacred. Combining musicological and philological scholarship, this book analyzes Dante's use of music in conjunction with the form and content of his verse, resulting in a cross-discipline analysis also touching on Italian Studies, Medieval Studies, and Cultural History. After moving from infernal din to heavenly harmony, Ciabattoni's final section addresses the music of the spheres, a theory that enjoyed great diffusion among the early middle ages, inspiring poets and philosophers for centuries.
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...
This book explores Italian science fiction from 1861, the year of Italy’s unification, to the present day, focusing on how this genre helped shape notions of Otherness and Normalness. In particular, Italian Science Fiction draws upon critical race studies, postcolonial theory, and feminist studies to explore how migration, colonialism, multiculturalism, and racism have been represented in genre film and literature. Topics include the role of science fiction in constructing a national identity; the representation and self-representation of “alien” immigrants in Italy; the creation of internal “Others,” such as southerners and Roma; the intersections of gender and race discrimination; and Italian science fiction’s transnational dialogue with foreign science fiction. This book reveals that though it is arguably a minor genre in Italy, science fiction offers an innovative interpretive angle for rethinking Italian history and imagining future change in Italian society.
Here is the first comprehensive examination of the international film career of Iowa-born actress Jean Seberg (1938-1979). Bursting onto the scene as star of Otto Preminger's controversial Saint Joan (1957), the 19-year-old Seberg encountered great difficulty recovering from the devastating criticism of her performance. The turnaround came in 1959 with her brilliant work in Jean-Luc Godard's "new wave" classic A bout de souffle (Breathless). Though her Hollywood prospects were harmed by subsequent political involvements, Seberg continued to work with some of Europe's finest directors. Her later films offer a fascinating view of the movie industry in the 1960s and 1970s--and of a courageous actress always ready for a new challenge. A biographical sketch provides a framework for detailed scrutiny of her 37 films. Background information and a critical evaluation is provided for each title.
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