Download or read book Italian Women s Autobiographical Writings in the Twentieth Century written by Ursula Fanning and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights the centrality of the autobiographical enterprise to Italian women’s writing through the twentieth century—a century that has frequently been referred to as the century of the self. Ursula Fanning addresses the thorny issue of essentialism potentially involved in underlining links between women’s writing and autobiographical modes, and ultimately rejects it in favor of an argument based on the cultural, linguistic, and literary marginalization of women writers within the Italian context. It is concerned with Italian women writers’ various ways of grappling with constructions of subjectivity throughout the century and sets out to explore them. Fanning reads autobiographical writing as subject to many of the same constraints as fiction and, in doing so, draws attention to the significance of the recurring use of the terms “pure” and “impure” in many critical and theoretical discussions of the autobiographical (where “pure” is used to suggest a truthful representation of a life, while “impure” suggests the messy undertaking of mixing lived experience with fiction). Recurring patterns and paradigms are found in the works of the various writers considered (eighteen in all), and these paradigms are analyzed through close readings of their works. These close readings offer insights into approaches to the constructions of subjectivity in the narratives and are informed by feminist theories. The chapters focus on selves in relationship, taking their lead from the patterns unfolding in the writers’ work, hence the subjects are constructed as daughters (with different views of the self in relation to fathers and mothers), within the confines of the romantic relationship (which involves reconsiderations and rewritings of the romance plot), as maternal subjects, and as writers (with an eye on their relationship to the literary canon, as well as to the relationship with readers). This book argues that there is such a thing as gendered subjectivity and that its constructions may be traced through the texts analyzed.

Download or read book Portrait of the Artist and His Mother in Twentieth Century Italian Culture written by Daniela Bini and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-11-05 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The power exercised by the mother on the son in Mediterranean cultures has been amply studied. Italy is a special case in the Modern Era and the phenomenon of Mammismo italiano is indeed well known. Scholars have traced this obsession with the mother figure to the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary, but in fact, it is more ancient. What has not been adequately addressed however, is how Mammismo italiano has been manifested in complex ways in various modern artistic forms. Portrait of the Artist and His Mother in Twentieth-Century Italian Culture focuses on case studies of five prominent creative personalities, representing different, sometimes overlapping artistic genres (Luigi Pirandello, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dino Buzzati, Carlo Levi, Federico Fellini). The author examines how the mother-son relationship not only affected, but actually shaped their work. Although the analysis uses mainly a psychological and psychoanalytical critical approach, the belief of the author, substantiated by historians, anthropologists and sociologists, is that historical and cultural conditions contributed to and reinforced the Italian character. This book concludes with an analysis of some examples of Italian film comedies, such as Fellini's and Monicelli's where mammismo/vitellonismo is treated with a lighter tone and a pointed self irony.

Download or read book Alfredo de Palchi written by Giorgio Linguaglossa and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this keen examination of Alfredo de Palchi’s lyrical oeuvre, Giorgio Linguaglossa refers to de Palchi as the missing link in Italian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. From page one of this study, de Palchi’s voice is in constant dialogue with the Italian poets of his time. Linguaglossa gives us a complete picture of the relationship between de Palchi’s asymptomatic creative paradigm and what was taking place around him. While the majority of de Palchi’s life was spent outside of Italy, he continued to engage with Italy in his poetry, in translating Italian poets into English and for close to fifty years as co-editor, with Sonia Raiziss, of Chelsea magazine, a biannual that published a significant number of translations of twentieth-century Italian poets. Through Chelsea magazine de Palchi also became a conduit, bringing Italian poetry to non-Italian-speaking poetry aficionados in the United States. It is especially his own verse, written outside the geocultural boundaries that we know as Italy, which makes this study by Giorgio Linguaglossa all the more important.

Download or read book Gendering Italian Fiction written by Maria Ornella Marotti and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is an exploration of the innovative ways in which three generations of women writers in modern Italy have dealt with history - both as narration of events and the events themselves. The essays challenge traditional historiography and foster a rereading of history based on the tenets of feminist historicism. They also claim a central role for fiction in the construction of women's history and in a rereading of Italian history.

Download or read book Return Narratives written by Theodora D. Patrona and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a comparative study of six Italian American and Greek American literary works written in the three last decades of the 20th century and examined in pairs. Based on the common theme of the authors' return, either metaphorical or literal to the country of origin and its culture, Return Narratives explores the common motifs of mythology, ritual, and storytelling where the third generation writers resort to in their quest for self-definition. With a common historical and cultural background in the old neighboring countries, Greece and Italy, and a similar reception in the new world facilitating a comparative approach, the ethnic writers of the two literatures, clearly envisage ethnic space as a site of resilience and empowerment.

Download or read book Values Virtues and Vices Italian Style written by Raymond Angelo Belliotti and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-08-26 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Values, Virtues, and Vices, Italian Style illustrates the story of the evolution of Italian values, virtues, and vices is a narrative of longing, exhilaration, and devastation, a journey of the spirit that all human beings necessarily undertake but navigate with varying degrees of success. The lives of Caesar, Dante, Machiavelli, and Garibaldi demonstrate how we can lead staunchly meaningful lives even within an inherently meaningless universe. The ambition of this work is nothing more, nothing less, than entangling, through a careful examination of the values, virtues, and vices of four famous historical figures, a host of overlapping but distinct concepts, such as pride, honor, justification, excuse, repentance, and forgiveness that frame human existence. Belliotti’s objective is that by conducting such an interdisciplinary inquiry we might better position ourselves to craft our characters within the limitations enjoined by our cosmic circumstances. As always, however, we must deliberate, choose, and act under conditions of inescapable uncertainty; assume responsibility for the people we are becoming; and, hopefully, depart the planet with honor and merited pride. Along the way, we might even magnify our link in the generational chain that defines our identity.

Download or read book Annie Chartres Vivanti written by Sharon Wood and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-10-12 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the work of a writer, Annie Chartres Vivanti (1866–1942), who brought a transnational dimension to the marked provincialism of the Italian novel by addressing issues of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality on personal and international levels, and by creating work that distanced itself from much of the female-penned literature of the day, scorning both decorum and social respectability. Chapters in this book examine Vivanti’s output from multiple perspectives, taking into account her politics and her career as a journalist, writer, and singer, as well as her literary work.

Download or read book Trump and Mussolini written by Anna Camaiti Hostert and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-10-17 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trump and Mussolini: Images, Fake News, and Mass Media as Weapons in the Hands of Two Populists compares two historic men of power and influence, Donald Trump and Benito Mussolini, to analyze the commonality of practices and mannerisms between the two. From rhetoric to body language, to their control over oral and written communication and analogous power strategies, they both possess an unusual talent for new technologies which they utilize to their advantage in unique moments in history. Mussolini lived at the beginning of mass society, Trump at the height of social media, both controversial leaders finding means to utilize these periods of time and the tools surrounding them to further their own agendas and influence society, culture, and authority. The authors examine a plethora of topics and themes such as outward personalities and consuming charisma, means and tools of communication and propaganda, and treatment of women, just to name a few, in order to define the relationship and similarities between these two controversial figures. This book was written before the Capitol Hill assault on January 6th 2021. Mussolini in November 1922 in front of the Parliament said: “I could have made a bivouac of this gloomy gray hall: I could have shut down the Parliament and formed a Government exclusively of Fascists; I could have done so, but I did not wish to do so, at least not at this moment.” Trump, however never said anything like this, but indeed, tried to do it.

Download or read book The Unpopular Realism of Vincenzo Padula written by Joseph Francese and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-10-18 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Unpopular Realism of Vincenzo Padula provides a microhistory of life in a Southern Italian province in the decade following Unificationand of Vincenzo Padula, who wrote single-handedly from March 1864 to July 1865 — a period when pro-Bourbon loyalists were attempting to exploit the discontent of the Region’s poor masses by fomenting brigantry and reverse the Unification — Il Bruzio, a pro-Government periodical published in Cosenza. The pro-government reformist Padula pointed out not only the successes but also the shortcomings and failures of the Savoy regime, so as to consolidate their rule. He gave particular attention to the problems of daily life through the correspondence of a literary creation, Mariuzza Sbrìffiti. The difficult integration of the South, in Padula’s view, was often exacerbated by the unwillingness of the “piemontesi” to learn the social, political, and economic realities of the South. Padula enables us to view from multiple angles both macroscopic issues, such as the relationship between the Church and the New Italy, and the dire state of the infrastructure and economy, and microscopic ones, such as the peasantry’s misplaced hopes in Garibaldi, clerical obscurantism, popular beliefs and culture, contradictions in the structure of the new liberal regime, and the status and role of women in such a society. He views his subjects from a unique perspective, one is defined by its empathy for and identification with the marginalized “persons of Calabria.”

Download or read book Motherhood Fatherland and Primo Levi written by Robert Pirro and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motherhood, Fatherland and Primo Levi: The Hidden Groundwork of Agency in his Auschwitz Writings offers major new insights into the political dimensions of Levi’s thought by using those texts conventionally thought to be marginal to his oeuvre (i.e., his short works of science fiction and fantasy and his World War Two partisan novel) to deepen our understanding of the lessons he offered in his more well-known and celebrated texts, Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved. Typically cast as one of the most profound theorists of what human beings at their worst can do to one another, Levi appears in this book as (in addition) a theorist who affirms a politics of active and broad participation in republican institutions as an important means of achieving a fulfilled human life. This book reinterprets Levi’s political significance by bringing to bear two literatures that have been previously missing from scholarly considerations of Levi’s legacy: psychologically-informed analyses of how infantile and toddler experience of, and relationship to, a primary caretaker shape later perceptions of self and relationship and studies of Machiavelli’s variant of republican thought in which major emphasis is placed on founding institutions of civic participation that develop responsible political leaders and foster good citizenship. In the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring, which has given rise to people acting on their worst impulses (ethnic cleansing, genocide) as well as on their best (revolution, democratic constitutionalism), Levi’s legacy, considered more comprehensively, can be a valuable touchstone for understanding the democratic possibilities of a world undergoing rapid political change. Avoiding academic jargon and entanglement in hyper-specialized academic debates, Motherhood, Fatherland and Primo Levi offers that comprehensive understanding to scholars across many fields (Italian studies, political theory, cultural studies, women’s studies, Holocaust studies, history) as well as to general interest readers of a humanistic bent and citizens concerned to make sense of this revolutionary age.

Download or read book Heroism and Wisdom Italian Style written by Raymond Angelo Belliotti and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-09-08 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an interdisciplinary work that philosophically analyzes concepts such as heroism; practical wisdom; honor; Nietzsche’s notions of will to power, the overman, and the three metamorphoses; Plato’s understanding of love; creating meaning in life; the issue of morally dirty hands in political administration; the relationship between political means and ends; the proper role of positive duties in society; the aspirations of grand strivers; and the linkages between biological, biographical, and autobiographical lives, all in the context of explaining and evaluating the lives and works of fourteen historically significant Italian: Gaius Julius Caesar, Brunetto Latini, Dante Alighieri, Caterina Sforza, Niccolò Machiavelli, Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Francesca Cabrini, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Antonio Gramsci, Salvatore Giuliano, Oriana Fallaci, Giovanni Falcone, and Paolo Borsellino. By dissecting the lives and philosophies of the figures discussed in this work, by extracting moral, political, and existential lessons from their aspirations and enterprises, by reflecting on their ideals from the vantage point of our divergent social context, by evaluating their virtues and vices from a wider perspective, and by confronting the conceptual puzzles and social impediments hampering the exercise of practical wisdom and heroism, we may confront the people that we are and reimagine the people we might become.

Download or read book Performing Bodies written by Catherine Ramsey-Portolano and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-12-29 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Bodies: Female Illness in Italian Literature and Cinema (1860-1920) explores the variations in the portrayal of female illness in Italian fin de siècle literature and early cinema. Catherine Ramsey-Portolano begins her study with an overview of nineteenth-century theories on female inferiority and nervous disorders, especially hysteria. 19th-century European scientific and philosophical discourse on women’s bodies, which focused on female biological functions and malfunctions, accompanied an abundant fin de siècle literary representation of female illness, a theme which also carried over into the cinematic genre of diva films of the 1910s. Ramsey-Portolano’s analysis of fin de siècle Italian literary texts first discusses those novels in which illness represents the consequence and at times punishment for women who transgressed traditional societal roles and norms of behavior. Ramsey-Portolano also demonstrates, however, that there also existed within a portrayal of female illness which suggested sickness as a form of agency for women. Rather than depicting women as powerless victims who succumb to illness due to the pressures and limitations of patriarchal society, this second group of novels posits illness as a means for women to take control of their bodies and demonstrate self-mastery through illness as a chosen form of behavior. Performing Bodies: Female Illness in Italian Literature and Cinema (1860-1920) concludes with a discussion of the role of female illness in Italian cinema of the 1910s. Ramsey-Portolano analyzes the films Tigre reale (1916) and Malombra (1917), featuring the divas Pina Menichelli and Lyda Borelli, to show how illness granted centrality to the female character. By placing the diva and her point of view at the center of the film’s action, these films posit the female character as the active one in advancing the story, thus providing a progressive model for female Italian viewers and an early example of the female gaze in Italian cinema. Performing Bodies: Female Illness in Italian Literature and Cinema (1860-1920) examines how in Italian literature and film, as well as in society, women were confined to traditional roles and illness often represented the consequence for transgressing those roles. Feigning illness offered women a way to “own” the illness and become manipulators and masters not only of their bodies but of their stories and destinies.

Download or read book Resistance Heroism Loss written by Thomas Cragin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In no other country in Europe has national identity been so closely bound to memories of the war. Italy’s Republic was born of World War II, its constitution defined by anti-Fascism, its parties self-identified with national Resistance. Because of their importance to the nation’s identity, the nature and meaning of the war have been the focus of great contention, from 1943 to the present day. In recent years Italy has taken on a national evaluation of the more troubling and contested aspects of its role in the war, including its support of Fascism and collaboration after 1943, its treatment of Jews and other minorities, deep national divisions that created a civil war between 1943 and 1945, and the centrality of war myth to lingering postwar problems. Scholars of Italian history, literature, and cinema play a fundamental role in this appraisal, and this volume of essays attests to the importance of film and literature to the ways in which changing political, social and cultural imperatives have altered the war’s memory. These articles expand our understanding of the shifting phases in national memory by highlighting significant features of each era’s portrayal of the war. Contributions come from eight scholars who capture the full variety of disciplinary and sub-disciplinary approaches that are current today, including film genre studies, cultural history, gender studies, Holocaust studies, and the very new fields of emotion studies, shame theory, and environmental studies. Their innovative application of questions and methods that speak to important new subfields in Italian Studies make this volume an invaluable tool for scholars and their students.

Download or read book The Italian Gothic and Fantastic written by Francesca Billiani and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2007 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meanwhile, by assimilating the Other into our own modes of representation of reality and imagination, twentieth-century female writers of the fantastic show how alternative identities can be shaped and social constituencies can be challenged."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Sicilian Elements in Andrea Camilleri s Narrative Language written by Cinzia Russi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-10-14 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sicilian Elements in Andrea Camilleri’s Narrative Language examines Camilleri’s unique linguistic repertoire and techniques over his career as a novelist. It focuses on the intensification of Sicilian linguistic features in Camilleri’s narrative works, in particular features pertaining to the domains of sounds and grammar, since these have been marginalized in linguistic-centered research on the evolution of Camilleri’s narrative language and remain overall understudied. Through a systematic comparative analysis of the distribution patterns of selected Sicilian features in a selection of Camilleri’s historical novels and novels of the Montalbano series, the author identifies the individual features that have become most widespread and the lexical items that are targeted with highest frequency and consistency. The results of the analysis show that in the earlier novels, Sicilian features are rather sparse and can be attributed to linguistic situational functionality; that is, they function as indices of salient, distinctive aspects of topics, settings, events/situations, and characters. Conversely, in the latest novels, Sicilian elements pervade the entire novels and the texts are written almost entirely in Camilleri’s own Sicilian, vigatese, so that Sicilian is stripped of any linguistic situational functionality.

Download or read book The Author in Criticism written by Elio Attilio Baldi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-03-11 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Transmissions of Memory written by Patrizia Sambuco and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-03-19 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas and Nostalgia in Post-World War II Italian Culture discusses cultural products—films, poetry, fiction, architectural buildings, autobiographical writing, and social media—to individuate through them the dynamics of memory. The field of analysis is Italian culture from World War II to the contemporary times, and the volume has in a gendered approach one of its focuses, offering an encompassing view on cultural memory and highlighting the similarities between gendered revisitation and revisitation of the past. The volume is divided into three sections: cultural transmissions, fractured memories, and nostalgia. In the chapters herewith the study of memory through these forms hints at a sense of transformation and often enrichment or resilience, individual or collective, that values more the present and the future rather than the past.