Download or read book Monsters in the Italian Literary Imagination written by Keala Jane Jewell and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A culture defines monsters against what is essentially thought of as human. Creatures such as the harpy, the siren, the witch, and the half-human all threaten to destroy our sense of power and intelligence and usurp our human consciousness. In this way, monster myths actually work to define a culture's definition of what is human. In Monsters in the Italian Literary Imagination, a broad range of scholars examine the monster in Italian culture and its evolution from the medieval period to the twentieth century. Editor Keala Jewell explores how Italian culture juxtaposes the powers of the monster against the human. The essays in this volume engage a wide variety of philological, feminist, and psychoanalytical approaches and examine monstrous figures from the medieval to postmodern periods. They each share a critical interest in how monsters reflect a culture's dominant ideologies.
Download or read book Italian Modernism written by Mario Moroni and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italian Modernism was written in response to the need for an historiographic and theoretical reconsideration of the concepts of Decadentismo and the avant-garde within the Italian critical tradition. Focussing on the confrontation between these concepts and the broader notion of international modernism, the essays in this important collection seek to understand this complex phase of literary and artistic practices as a response to the epistemes of philosophical and scientific modernity at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first three decades of the twentieth. Intellectually provocative, this collection is the first attempt in the field of Italian Studies at a comprehensive account of Italian literary modernism. Each contributor documents how previous critical categories, employed to account for the literary, artistic, and cultural experiences of the period, have provided only partial and inadequate descriptions, preventing a fuller understanding of the complexities and the interrelations among the cultural phenomena of the time.
Download or read book Murder Made in Italy written by Ellen Nerenberg and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-29 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of three high-profile Italian murder cases, how they were covered by the media, and what it all says about Italian culture. Looking at media coverage of three very prominent murder cases, Murder Made in Italy explores the cultural issues raised by the murders and how they reflect developments in Italian civil society over the past twenty years. Providing detailed descriptions of each murder, investigation, and court case, Ellen Nerenberg addresses the perception of lawlessness in Italy, the country’s geography of crime, and the generalized fear for public safety among the Italian population. Nerenberg examines the fictional and nonfictional representations of these crimes through the lenses of moral panic, media spectacle, true crime writing, and the abject body. The worldwide publicity given the recent case of Amanda Knox, the American student tried for murder in a Perugia court, once more drew attention to crime and punishment in Italy and is the subject of the epilogue. “A fantastic array of literary, cinematic, and oral narratives.” —Stefania Lucamante, Catholic University of America “Original, engaging, and thought-provoking . . . quite unlike any other existing book in Italian cultural and media studies.” —Ruth Glynn, University of Bristol
Download or read book The Smells and Senses of Antiquity in the Modern Imagination written by Adeline Grand-Clément and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-16 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume tackles the role of smell, under-explored in relation to the other senses, in the modern rejection, reappraisal and idealisation of antiquity. Among the senses olfaction in particular has often been overlooked in classical reception studies due to its evanescent nature, which makes this sense difficult to apprehend in its past instantiations. And yet, the smells associated with a given figure or social group convey a rich imagery which in turn connotes specific values: perfumes, scents and foul odours both reflect and mould the ways in which a society thinks or acts. Smells also help to distinguish between male and female, citizens and strangers, and play an important role during rituals. The Smells and Senses of Antiquity in the Modern Imagination focuses on the representation of ancient smells - both enticing and repugnant - in the visual and performative arts from the late 18th century up to the 21st century. The individual contributions explore painting, sculpture, literature and film, but also theatrical performance, museum exhibitions, advertising, television series, historical reenactment and graphic novels, which have all played a part in reshaping modern audiences' perceptions and experiences of the antique.
Download or read book Holy Monsters Sacred Grotesques written by Michael E. Heyes and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-08-10 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques examines the intersection of religion and monstrosity in a variety of different time periods in the hopes of addressing two gaps in scholarship within the field of monster studies. The first part of the volume—running from the medieval to the Early Modern period—focuses upon the view of the monster through non-majority voices and accounts from those who were themselves branded as monsters. Overlapping partially with the Early Modern and proceeding to the present day, the contributions of the second part of the volume attempt to problematize the dichotomy of secular/religious through a close look at the monsters this period has wrought.
Download or read book Modernism and the Avant garde Body in Spain and Italy written by Nicolas Fernandez-Medina and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary volume interrogates bodily thinking in avant-garde texts from Spain and Italy during the early twentieth century and their relevance to larger modernist preoccupations with corporeality. It examines the innovative ways Spanish and Italian avant-gardists explored the body as a locus for various aesthetic and sociopolitical considerations and practices. In reimagining the nexus points where the embodied self and world intersect, the texts surveyed in this book not only shed light on issues such as authority, desire, fetishism, gender, patriarchy, politics, religion, sexuality, subjectivity, violence, and war during a period of unprecedented change, but also explore the complexities of aesthetic and epistemic rupture (and continuity) within Spanish and Italian modernisms. Building on contemporary scholarship in Modernist Studies and avant-garde criticism, this volume brings to light numerous cross-cultural touch points between Spain and Italy, and challenges the center/periphery frameworks of European cultural modernism. In linking disciplines, genres, —isms, and geographical spheres, the book provides new lenses through which to explore the narratives of modernist corporeality. Each contribution centers around the question of the body as it was actively being debated through the medium of poetic, literary, and artistic exchange, exploring the body in its materiality and form, in its sociopolitical representation, relation to Self, cultural formation, spatiality, desires, objectification, commercialization, and aesthetic functions. This comparative approach to Spanish and Italian avant-gardism offers readers an expanded view of the intersections of body and text, broadening the conversation in the larger fields of cultural modernism, European Avant-garde Studies, and Comparative Literature.
Download or read book Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema written by Francesco Pascuzzi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-01-21 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema explores different representations of dreams, visions, hallucinations, and hypnagogic states in Italian film culture, covering the works of some of the most significant auteurs in the history of Italian cinema (Fellini, Pasolini, Moretti, Bellocchio, among others). Dreams are discussed both in a filmic context, considering the diegetic and formal techniques employed to construct and represent them, and as allegories or metaphors in a broader cultural, political, and social sense (the film industry itself as the proverbial dream factory, and dreams as hopes, aspirations or altogether parallel universes, for example). The book covers works released over different decades and spanning multiple genres (drama, gothic film, horror, comedy), and it is intended to shed light on a topic that is as suggestive as it is insufficiently studied.
Download or read book Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante written by Elena Lombardi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante brings to light a new character in medieval literature: that of the woman reader and interlocutor. It does so by establishing a dialogue between literary studies, gender studies, the history of literacy, and the material culture of the book in medieval times. From Guittone d'Arezzo's piercing critic, the 'villainous woman', to the mysterious Lady who bids Guido Cavalcanti to write his grand philosophical song, to Dante's female co-editors in the Vita Nova and his great characters of female readers, such as Francesca and Beatrice in the Comedy, all the way to Boccaccio's overtly female audience, this particular interlocutor appears to be central to the construct of textuality and the construction of literary authority. This volume explores the figure of the woman reader by contextualizing her within the history of female literacy, the material culture of the book, and the ways in which writers and poets of earlier traditions imagined her. It argues that these figures are not mere veneers between a male author and a 'real' male readership, but that, although fictional, they bring several advantages to their vernacular authors, such as orality, the mother tongue, the recollection of the delights of early education, literality, freedom in interpretation, absence of teleology, the beauties of ornamentation and amplification, a reduced preoccupation with the fixity of the text, the pleasure of making mistakes, dialogue with the other, the extension of desire, original simplicity, and new and more flexible forms of authority.
Download or read book Italian Motherhood on Screen written by Giovanna Faleschini Lerner and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-14 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first scholarly analysis that considers the specificity of situated experiences of the maternal from a variety of theoretical perspectives. From “Fertility Day” to “Family Day,” the concept of motherhood has been at the center of the public debate in contemporary Italy, partly in response to the perceived crisis of the family, the economic crisis, and the crisis of national identity, provoked by the forces of globalization and migration, secularization, and the instability of labor markets. Through essays by an international cohort of established and emerging scholars, this volume aims to read these shifts in cinematic terms. How does Italian cinema represent, negotiate, and elaborate changing definitions of motherhood in narrative, formal, and stylistic terms? The essays in this volume focus on the figures of working mothers, women who opt for a child-free adulthood, single mothers, ambivalent mothers, lost mothers, or imperfect mothers, who populate contemporary screen narratives.
Download or read book Disgust and Desire written by Kristen Wright and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-01-03 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monsters have taken many forms across time and cultures, yet within these variations, monsters often evoke the same paradoxical response: disgust and desire. We simultaneously fear monsters and take pleasure in seeing them, and their role in human culture helps to explain this apparent contradiction. Monsters are created in order to delineate where the acceptable boundaries of action and emotion exist. However, while killing the monster allows us to cast out socially unacceptable desires, the prevalence of monsters in both history and fiction reveals humanity’s desire to see and experience the forbidden. We seek, write about, and display monsters as both a warning and wish fulfilment, and monsters, therefore, reveal that the line between desire and disgust is often thin. Looking across genres, subjects, and periods, this book examines what our conflicted reaction to the monster tells us about human culture.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of the Literature of Empire written by Mary Ellen Snodgrass and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the world's greatest literature about empires and imperialism, including more than 200 entries on writers, classic works, themes, and concepts.
Download or read book Monsters and Monstrosity in Augustan Poetry written by Dunstan Lowe and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important contribution to the growing interdisciplinary field of monster studies
Download or read book Italian Horror Cinema written by Baschiera Stefano Baschiera and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its heyday from the late 1950s until the early 1980s Italian horror cinema was characterised by an excess of gore, violence and often incoherent plot-lines. Films about zombies, cannibals and psychopathic killers ensured there was no shortage of controversy, and the genre presents a seemingly unpromising nexus of films for sustained critical analysis. But Italian horror cinema with all its variations, subgenres and filoni remains one of the most recognisable and iconic genre productions in Europe, achieving cult status worldwide. One of the manifestations of a rich production landscape in Italian popular cinema after the Second World War, Italian horror was also characterised by its imitation of foreign models and the transnational dimension of its production agreements, as well as by its international locations and stars.This collection brings together for the first time a range of contributions aimed at a new understanding of the genre, investigating the different phases in its history, the peculiarities of the production system, the work of its most representative directors (Mario Bava and Dario Argento) and the wider role it has played within popular culture.
Download or read book The Body in Early Modern Italy written by Julia L. Hairston and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-04 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human bodies have been represented and defined in various ways across different cultures and historical periods. As an object of interpretation and site of social interaction, the body has throughout history attracted more attention than perhaps any other element of human experience. The essays in this volume explore the manifestations of the body in Italian society from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Adopting a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, these fresh and thought-provoking essays offer original perspectives on corporeality as understood in the early modern literature, art, architecture, science, and politics of Italy. An impressively diverse group of contributors comment on a broad range and variety of conceptualizations of the body, creating a rich dialogue among scholars of early modern Italy. Contributors: Albert R. Ascoli, University of California, Berkeley; Douglas Biow, The University of Texas at Austin; Margaret Brose, University of California, Santa Cruz; Anthony Colantuono, University of Maryland, College Park; Elizabeth Horodowich, New Mexico State University; Sergius Kodera, New Design University, St. Pölten, Austria; Jeanette Kohl, University of California, Riverside; D. Medina Lasansky, Cornell University; Luca Marcozzi, Roma Tre University; Ronald L. Martinez, Brown University; Katharine Park, Harvard University; Sandra Schmidt, Free University of Berlin; Bette Talvacchia, University of Connecticut
Download or read book The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction written by Barbara Pezzotti and published by Fairleigh Dickinson. This book was released on 2012-09-14 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By taking as its point of departure the privileged relationship between the crime novel and its setting, this book is the most wide-ranging examination of the way in which Italian detective fiction in the last 20 years has become a means to articulate the changes in the social landscape of the country. Nowadays there is a general acknowledgment of the importance of place in Italian crime novels. However, apart from a limited scholarship on single cities, the genre has never been systematically studied in a way that so comprehensively spans Italian national boundaries. The originality of this volume also lies in the fact that the author have not limited her investigation to a series of cities, but rather she has considered the different forms of (social) landscape in which Italian crime novels are set. Through the analysis of the way in which cities, the "urban sprawl," and islands are represented in the serial novels of 11 of the most important contemporary crime writers in Italy of the 1990s, Pezzotti articulates the different ways in which individual authors appropriate the structures and tropes of the genre to reflect the social transformations and dysfunctions of contemporary Italy. In so doing, this volume also makes a case for the genre as an instrument of social critique and analysis of a still elusive Italian national identity, thus bringing further evidence in support of the thesis that in Italy detective fiction has come to play the role of the new "social novel."
Download or read book Giambattista Basile s The Tale of Tales Or Entertainment for Little Ones written by Giambattista Basile and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first unabridged English translation taken directly from Basile's monumental Lo cunto de li cunti (1634-1636), this edition is fully annotated and illustrated, with an extensive bibliography.
Download or read book The Cinema of Italy written by Giorgio Bertellini and published by Wallflower Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giorgio Bertellini examines the historical and aesthetic connections of some of Italy's most important films with both Italian and Western film culture.