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Giorgio Manganelli (1922-1990), one of Italy's most radical and original writers, went further than most in exploring the creative possibilities of hybrid genres and open forms. Ostentation, theatricality, and a love of drapery and verbal excess are defining features of his body of work, which ranges from prose fiction, literary criticism, and drama to travel writing, treatises, commentaries, and imaginary interviews. This study examines the wealth of Manganelli's imagination - his grotesque animals, speaking corpses, and melancholy spectres - and argues that his spectacular eloquence was shaped by an exceptional awareness of literary and philosophical models. Following Manganelli's lead, the author addresses issues such as the boundaries of meaningful language, the relationship between literary and visual texts, fantasy and realism, and the power of literature to express the apprehensions and intimations of human consciousness.
"Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) is best known for the intense lyrical vision of his first three collections of poetry, written between the 1920s and early 1950s. With the publication of ""Satura"" in 1971, the profile of his work changes irrevocably as a new disillusioned voice emerged, commenting ironically on post-war Italian society and debunking his own previous poetic myths. O'Ceallachin, while placing this body of work firmly in its historical and ideological context, explores the poetic texts in detail, approaching the work from a variety of interpretative and thematic angles, and constructing a comprehensive reading of Montale's later work."
"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."
Broadly conceived, literature consists of aesthetic and cultural processes that can be thought of as forms of translation. By the same token, translation requires the sort of creative or interpretive understanding usually associated with literature. Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature explores a number of themes centred on this shared identity of literature and translation as creative acts of interpretation and understanding. The metaphor or motif of translation is the touchstone of this volume, which looks at how an expanded idea of translation sheds light not just on features of literary composition and reception, but also on modes of intercultural communication at a time w...
In the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, Italian poetry experienced an extraordinary heyday. In ten chapters, the present volume provides exemplary insights into this period. English adaptations of selected poems are followed by literary-historical classifications and interpretations against the background of the life and work of the poets concerned.
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Giorgio Bassani is an Italian-Jewish writer from Ferrara, famous largely for 'The Garden of the Finzi-Contini', 'The Golden-Rimmed Eye Glasses' and other novels, brought together in 'Il Romanzo di Ferrara' (1980). In this monumental work, Bassani describes the life of the Italian Jews under Fascism. Bassani may be seen as not just a fictional writer, but as a witness of persecution of Jews under Fascism; his 'Romance' is not so much a novel but a multifaceted document on Jewish life in the peninsular. This volume takes into account a close reading of Bassani, literary theories on witnessing the Shoa, and the historical debate on Italian discriminatory politics. The book is thus both literary criticism and an analysis of anti- Semitism and Jewish assimilation in Italy.
Within a biographical context, this critical study explores the way in which Malaparte used his political pamphlets, prose poems, satirical verse and travel writings for the purposes of self-re-invention. The changing nature of the writer's rapport with his readership is also closely analysed, as this volume sheds new light on the controversies which surrounded one of the most versatile Italian writers of the twentieth century.
In the half-century following Pavese's death, much that was written about him sought principally to understand and define his complex character, and to determine his place within the twentieth-century Italian literary canon. Latterly, there appears to have been a significant shift in focus towards a closer reading of individual works or aspects or periods of his writing, the better to analyse and reveal the subtleties and depth of his vision. This present collection of ten essays conforms broadly with this tendency. It is organised chronologically with regard to Pavese's life and works so as to convey a sense of the development of a writer, over and above the particular concerns of any given essay. The book features contributions from many leading experts on Pavese.