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Dacia Maraini’s Narratives of Survival
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 187

Dacia Maraini’s Narratives of Survival

Dacia Maraini’s Narratives of Survival: (Re)Constructed focuses on Dacia Maraini’s narrative from about 1984 to 2004 and makes substantive use of her interviews and essays. While acknowledging the importance and ongoing validity of feminist scholarship of Maraini’s work, this book seeks to take scholarship on Maraini beyond feminist readings by identifying a critical framework that cuts across gender and genre and thereby invites alternative readings. Using a method of close textual analysis, the author includes studies of men, children, animals, and imaginary characters in Maraini’s narrative, analyzes language, character, motifs, and symbols, and considers some of Maraini’s work ...

Italo Calvino
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 184

Italo Calvino

She uncovers the apparent contradiction that while Calvino repeatedly advocated - throughout his career of forty-plus years - a precise language, this call for precision did not extend to erotic subject matter, where Calvino sometimes felt that "direct representation" was virtually impossible. Gabriele finds that in Calvino the challenge of erotic representation is linked to the complexity of the writer's role, especially as articulated in Calvino's famous article, "Cibernetica e fantasmi."

Davide Rondoni
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 181

Davide Rondoni

In this monograph, Gregory M. Pell provides a full-length study on the poetry of Davide Rondoni, one of Italy’s most active contemporary writers and thinkers. This book includes comparative studies of Jorie Graham, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Charles Wright, John Ashbery, Patrizia Fazzi, and Mario Luzi. As the first book in English on Davide Rondoni’s poetry, this study explores how the Italian poet deals with art, and the places of art, in a way that transcends the notion of ekphrasis (or, verbal representation of pictorial art) to see poetry as the transcription of an experience with art, thus becoming a sort of anti-ekphrasis, or an atmospheric ekphrasis. The social and religious aspects of art take precedence over aesthetic concerns, without discounting them, in Rondoni’s unsentimental poetry, which takes the form of recitative theatrical monologues. Thus, art becomes more than simple visual representation or the subject of an art history catalogue. Instead, in certain poets, such as Rondoni, we experience life through art’s complete process: from the artist’s originary idea to the work’s execution to our interaction with it in the here and now.

Maternal Desire
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 254

Maternal Desire

She argues that Ginzburg adopted a distinct aesthetic by allowing her family stories to be narrated through a female narrating "I." This volume focuses on the broad theme of the maternal by tracing the development of the voices of Ginzburg's narrating daughters, mothers, and sisters. Their texts read as auto/biographies; that is, they are narratives about both the self and the other."--BOOK JACKET.

The Afterlife of
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 437

The Afterlife of "Little Women"

“Superb, scrupulously researched . . . a comprehensive narrative for understanding the changing reception of Little Women.” —Gregory Eiselein, coeditor of The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia The hit Broadway show of 1912. The lost film of 1919. Katharine Hepburn, as Jo, sliding down a banister in George Cukor’s 1933 movie. Mark English’s shimmering 1967 illustrations. Jo—this time played by Sutton Foster—belting “I'll be / astonishing” in the 2004 Broadway musical flop. These are only some of the markers of the afterlife of Little Women. There’s also the nineteenth-century child who wrote, “If you do not ...make Laurie marry Beth, I will never read another of your books ...

Addressing the Letter
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 201

Addressing the Letter

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.

Life, Brazen and Garish
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 100

Life, Brazen and Garish

Three generations of women live together under the same roof. Though they are united by blood, each of the Cascadei women has a very different personality and way of expressing herself. Teenage daughter Lori scribbles impulsively in her diary, so eager to speed off on her moped that she rarely bothers with punctuation. Mother Maria, a professional translator, writes detailed and observant letters yet doesn’t see what is happening right in front of her. And grandmother Gesuina, a former stage actress, speaks into an audio recorder, giving a provocative and brutally candid performance for an imagined audience that might never listen. Life, Brazen and Garish offers a fresh take on the epistol...

A Multitude of Women
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 337

A Multitude of Women

A Multitude of Women looks at the ways in which both Italian literary tradition and external influences have assisted Italian women writers in rethinking the theoretical and aesthetic ties between author, text, and readership in the construction of the novel. Stefania Lucamante discusses the valuable contributions that Italian women writers have made to the contemporary novel and illustrates the relevance of the novelistic examples set by their predecessors. She addresses various discursive communities, reading works by Di Lascia, Ferrante, Vinci, and others with reference to intertextuality and the theories of Elsa Morante and Simone de Beauvoir. This study identifies a positive deviation f...

Allegories of Transgression and Transformation
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 304

Allegories of Transgression and Transformation

At the nexus of politics and sexuality, Allegories of Transgression and Transformation examines how women's writing produced in the wake of authoritarian regimes in several South American countries simultaneously challenges both the effects of dictatorship and restrictive gender codes. The author examines the experimental fictions of four contemporary Latin American writers: Diamela Eltit of Chile, Nelida Pinon of Brazil, Reina Roffe of Argentina, and Cristina Peri Rossi of Uruguay. Tierney-Tello begins her study by exploring the particular relationships among authoritarian political oppression, restrictive gender codes, and the practice of writing. Then, through close readings that draw on feminist, psychoanalytic, and socio-political literary theories, she shows how each of the selected narratives illustrates different aspects of the effects of dictatorship, while also striving to develop new means of articulating gender and feminine sexuality. Throughout, Allegories of Transgression and Transformation suggests how the use of allegory allows these texts to question socio-political, genderic, and textual forms of authority and to trace an/other story.

Calvino and the Pygmalion Paradigm
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 252

Calvino and the Pygmalion Paradigm

Calvino and the Pygmalion Paradigm: Fashioning the Feminine in I nostri antenati and Gli amori difficili is the first book-length analysis of the representation of the feminine in Calvino’s fiction. Using the structural umbrella of the Pygmalion paradigm and using feminist interpretative techniques, this book offers interesting alternative readings of two of Calvino’s important early narrative collections. The Pygmalion paradigm concerns the creation by a male ‘artist’ of a feminine ideal and highlights the artificiality and narcissistic desire associated with the creation process. This book discusses Calvino’s active and deliberate work of self-creation, accomplished through exten...