One of the most important Italian poets of the last century, Vittorio Sereni (1913–83) wrote with a historical awareness unlike that of any of his contemporaries. A poet of both personal and political responsibility, his work sensitively explores life under fascism, military defeat and imprisonment, and the resurgence of extreme right-wing politics, as well as the roles played by love and friendship in the survival of humanity. The first substantial translation of Sereni’s oeuvre published anywhere in the world, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni is a unique guide to this twentieth-century poet. A bilingual edition, reissued in paperback for the poet’s centenary, it collects Sereni’s poems, criticism, and short fiction with a full chronology, commentary, bibliography, and learned introduction by British poet and scholar Peter Robinson.
Vittorio Sereni (1913-1983) is widely regarded as the finest Italian poet of the generation after Montale. This volume spans the whole of his creative career, and is designed to give a sense of the structure and coherence of his work as a whole.
This is the first book-length study in English on Vittorio Sereni (1913-83), a major figure in Italian 20th-century poetry. It argues that a key innovation of Sereni's poetry is the way in which it reworks the boundaries of poetic space to construct a lyric 'I' radically repositioned in the textual universe with respect to its predecessors.
The volume assesses performative structures within a variety of medieval forms of textuality, from vernacular literature to records of parliamentary proceedings, from prayer books to musical composition. Three issues are central to the volume: the role of ritual speech acts; the way in which authorship can be seen as created within medieval texts rather than as a given category; finally, phenomena of voice, created and situated between citation and repetition, especially in forms which appropriate and transform literary tradition. The volume encompasses articles by historians and musicologists as well as literary scholars. It spans European literature from the West (French, German, Italian) to the East (Church Slavonic), vernacular and Latin; it contrasts modes of liturgical meditation in the Western and Eastern Church with secular plays and songs, and it brings together studies on the character of ‛voice’ in major medieval authors such as Dante with examples of Dante-reception in the early twentieth century.
Drawing on the recent focus on spatial imagination in the humanities and social sciences, Poetry and Geography looks at the significance of space, place, and landscape in the works of British and Irish poets, offering interpretations of poems by Roy Fisher, R. S. Thomas, John Burnside, Thomas Kinsella, Jo Shapcott, and many others. Its fourteen essays collectively sketch a series of intersections between language and location, form and environment, and sound and space, exploring poetry's unique capacity to invigorate and expand our spatial vocabularies and the many relationships we have with the world around us.
Providing the most complete record possible of texts by Italian writers active after 1900, this annotated bibliography covers over 4,800 distinct editions of writings by some 1,700 Italian authors. Many entries are accompanied by useful notes that provide information on the authors, works, translators, and the reception of the translations. This book includes the works of Pirandello, Calvino, Eco, and more recently, Andrea Camilleri and Valerio Manfredi. Together with Robin Healey’s Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation, also published by University of Toronto Press in 2011, this volume makes comprehensive information on translations from Italian accessible for schools, libraries, and those interested in comparative literature.
John Taylor's brilliant new book examines the work of many of the major poets who have deeply marked modern and contemporary European literature. Venturing far and wide from the France in which he has lived since the late 1970s, the polyglot writer-critic not only delves into the more widely translated literatures of Italy, Greece, Germany, and Austria, but also discovers impressive and overlooked work in Slovenia, Bosnia, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands in this book that ranges over nearly all of Europe, including Russia.While providing this stimulating and far-ranging critical panorama, Taylor brings to light key themes of European writing: the depth of everyday life, the quest of the thing-in-itself, metaphysical aspiration and anxiety, the dialectics of negativity and affirmation, subjectivity and self-effacement, and uprootedness as a category that is as ontological as it is geographical, historical, political, or cultural. The book pays careful attention to the intersection of writing and history (or politics), as several poets featured here have faced the Second World War, the Holocaust, Communism, the fall of Communism, or the war in the former Yugoslavia.Taylor gives the work of renowned, upcoming, and still little-known poets a thorough look, all the while scrutinizing recent translations of their verse. He highlights several poets who are also masters of the prose poem. He includes a few novelists who have fashioned a particularly original kind of poetic prose, that stylistic category that has proved so difficult for critics to define. Into the Heart of European Poetry should be of immediate interest to any reader curious about the aesthetic and philosophical ideas underlying major trends of contemporary European writing. In a day and age when much too little is translated and thus known about foreign literature, and when Europeans themselves are pondering the common denominators of their own culture, this book is a
`The conviction, pleasures and gratitude of committed reading are evident in his affirmation of the poetic contract between readers and writers.' Andrea Brady, Poetry Review --
