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.
The Author in Criticism:Italo Calvino’s Authorial Image in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom explores the cultural and historic patterns and differences in the critical readings of Italian author Italo Calvino’s works in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Italy. It considers the external factors that contribute to create recognizable patterns in the readings of Calvino’s texts in different contexts. This volume therefore covers, most notably, matters of genre (science fiction, postmodernism), cultural perceptions and conventions, the (re)current image of the author in different media, academic schools, -curricula and -canons, biographical information (such as gender and background), and translation and the language in which the author speaks (or fails to speak) to us. It traces the influence of these aspects in the academic discourse on Calvino. The Author in Criticism also analyzes Calvino’s various professional roles as writer, editor, essayist, journalist, private correspondent, and public, cosmopolitan intellectual, reappraising their often little acknowledged importance for academic criticism. An important underlying idea is that the preconceived image that every critic has of Calvino before even opening one of his books is often solidified and repeated even in the most refined and complex critical analyses. This volume purposefully foregrounds the textual and non-textual parts that are usually considered peripheral to the works of an author, such as book covers, blurbs, reviews, talks, interviews, etc. In this way, this book provides insight into the reception of Calvino’s works in different countries. Moreover, it forms a broader reflection of and on important constants in the workings of literary criticism, and on the way academic discourses have developed in various cultural contexts over the last decades.
This book explores Kafka's sometimes surprising connections with key Italian writers, from Italo Calvino to Elena Ferrante, who shaped Italy's modern literary landscape.
After almost seven centuries, Dante endures and even seems to haunt the present. Metamorphosing Dante explores what so many authors, artists and thinkers from varied backgrounds have found in Dante’s oeuvre, and the ways in which they have engaged with it through rewritings, dialogues, and transpositions. By establishing trans-disciplinary routes, the volume shows that, along with a corpus of multiple linguistic and narrative structures, characters, and stories, Dante has provided a field of tensions in which to mirror and investigate one’s own time. Authors explored include Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, André Gide, Derek Jarman, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, James Joyce, Wolfgang Koeppen, Jacques Lacan, Thomas Mann, James Merrill, Eugenio Montale, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cesare Pavese, Giorgio Pressburger, Robert Rauschenberg, Vittorio Sereni, Virginia Woolf.
This volume on Cesare Pavese is published on the 72nd anniversary of his death, and it aims to explore new perspectives to study this relevant intellectual. The multifaceted personality of Cesare Pavese took many different forms and allowed him to explore different aspects of literary production. He was a poet, a novelist, an essayist, a translator of some of the most important American writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. He also worked for 20 years at Einaudi Publishing House, where he became one of the most relevant figures of the company and the Italian literary and cultural scene between the 1930s and 1950s. This collection provides new perspectives of study by focusing on different aspects of his job and by analyzing the strong connections between his personal and professional life. It will appeal to graduate students and scholars in contemporary Italian literature.
This collection of essays surveys some of the artistic productions by female figures who stood at the forefront of Italian modernity in the fields of literature, photography, and even the theatre, in order to explore how artistic engagement in women informed their views on, and reactions to the challenges of a changing society and a ‘disinhibiting’ intellectual landscape. However, one other objective takes on a central role in this volume: that of opening a window on the re-definition of the subjectivity of the self that occurred during an intriguing and still not fully studied period of artistic and societal changes. In particular, the present volume aims to define a female Italian Modernism which can be seen as complementary, and not necessarily in opposition, to its male counterpart.
