Bøger i Toronto Italian Studies serien

Building a Monument to Dante employs literary analysis coupled with philological and historical evidence to argue that Boccaccio's multifaceted work as Dante's editor, biographer, apologist, and commentator created a literary figure that could support Boccaccio's poetic and political ideologies.

Ugo Foscolo's Tragic Vision in Italy and England examines an underexplored aspect of Foscolo's literary career: his tragic plays and critical essays on that genre.

Using little-known Italian, Austrian, and Dalmatian sources, Monzali explores the political history of Dalmatia between 1848 and 1915, with a focus on the Italian minority, on Austrian-Italian relations and on the foreign policy of the Italian state towards the region and its peoples.

Including work on psychoanalysis, politics, film production, autobiography, and the relationship between film tradition and contemporary culture, Marco Bellocchio touches on fundamental issues in film analysis.

Hopeless Love uncovers the diffusion of queer female desire in Italian literature and promotes a better understanding of sexuality in medieval and Renaissance Europe.

The Revolt of the Scribe in Modern Italian Literature offers a perceptive re-assessment of Italian literary culture, focusing on the nature of modernity through the literature of those who revolt against established norms and expectations.

In The Sopranos: Born under a Bad Sign, Franco Ricci presents an insightful analysis of the groundbreaking HBO series and its complex psychological themes

In Courtesy Lost, Kristina M. Olson analyses the literary impact of the social, political, and economic transformations of the fourteenth century through an exploration of Dante's literary and political influence on Boccaccio.

Measured Words brings together rarely discussed Renaissance thinkers to show both the commonalities within and the variety of the conversations between computation and writing.

Modernist Idealism develops a framework for understanding modernist production as the artistic realization of philosophical concepts elaborated in German idealism.

In classical and early modern rhetoric, to write or speak using the voice of a dead individual is known as eidolopoeia. Whether through ghost stories, journeys to another world, or dream visions, Renaissance writers frequently used this rhetorical device not only to co-opt the authority of their predecessors but in order to express partisan or politically dangerous arguments.In Speaking Spirits, Sherry Roush presents the first systematic study of early modern Italian eidolopoeia. Expanding the study of Renaissance eidolopoeia beyond the well-known cases of the shades in Dante’s Commedia and the spirits of Boccaccio’s De casibus vivorum illustrium, Roush examines many other appearances of famous ghosts – invocations of Boccaccio by Vincenzo Bagli and Jacopo Caviceo, Girolamo Malipiero’s representation of Petrarch in Limbo, and Girolamo Benivieni’s ghostly voice of Pico della Mirandola. Through close readings of these eidolopoetic texts, she illuminates the important role that this rhetoric played in the literary, legal, and political history of Renaissance Italy.

Contemporary Italian Filmmaking is an innovative critique of Italian filmmaking in the aftermath of World War II - as it moves beyond traditional categories such as genre film and auteur cinema. Manuela Gieri demonstrates that Luigi Pirandello's revolutionary concept of humour was integral to the development of a counter-tradition in Italian filmmaking that she defines `humoristic'. She delineates a `Pirandellian genealogy' in Italian cinema, literature, and culture through her examination of the works of Federico Fellini, Ettore Scola, and many directors of the `new generation,' such as Nanni Moretti, Gabriele Salvatores, Maurizio Nichetti, and Giuseppe Tornatore.A celebrated figure of the theatrical world, Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is little known beyond Italy for his critical and theoretical writings on cinema and for his screenplays. Gieri brings to her reading of Pirandello's work the critical parameters offered by psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and postmodernism to develop a syncretic and transcultural vision of the history of Italian cinema. She identifies two fundamental trends of development in this tradition: the `melodramatic imagination' and the `humoristic,' or comic, imagination. With her focus on the humoristic imagination, Gieri describes a `Pirandellian mode' derived from his revolutionary utterances on the cinema and narrative, and specifically, from his essay on humour, L'umorismo (On Humour, 1908). She traces a history of the Pirandellian mode in cinema and investigates its characteristics, demonstrating the original nature of Italian filmmaking that is particularly indebted to Pirandello's interpretation of humour.

One of the most famous and prestigious of Renaissance schools, Italy's University of Padua attracted a notable body of students from England, including such well-known alumni as Thomas Linacre, Thomas Starkey, and William Harvey. In this work Jonathan Woolfson looks at the reasons why so many Englishmen went to Padua, what they did there, and most importantly, the various ways in which their studies had an impact on Tudor life and thought.Covering a formidable range of intellectual history, Woolfson explores the complex processes of cultural transmission between Italy and England in the areas of humanism, law, political thought, medicine, and natural philosophy. An impressive feature of the book is its biographical register of English visitors to Padua, which comprises 349 separate entries drawn from extensive archival research in Italy and England. From the collective biography that results, as well as from textual studies, Woolfson argues that Padua influenced England in ways that were profound and enduring, but also extremely diverse and sometimes surprising.

The ugly woman is a surprisingly common figure in Italian poetry, one that has been frequently appropriated by male poetic imagination to depict moral, aesthetic, social, and racial boundaries. Mostly used between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries - from the invectives of Rustico Filippi, Franco Sacchetti, and Burchiello, to the paradoxical praises of Francesco Berni, Niccolo Campani and Pietro Aretino, and further to the conceited encomia of Giambattista Marino and Marinisti - the portrayal of female unattractiveness was, argues Patrizia Bettella in The Ugly Woman, one way of figuring woman as 'other.'Bettella shows how medieval female ugliness included transgressive types ranging from the lustful old hag, to the slanderer, the wild woman, the heretic/witch, and the prostitute, whereas Early Modern unattractiveness targeted peasants, mountain dwellers, and black slaves: marginal women whose bodies and manners subvert aesthetic precepts of culturally normative beauty and propriety. Taking a philological and feminist approach, and drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of the grotesque body and on the poetics of transgression, The Ugly Woman is a unique look at the essential counterdiscourse of the celebrated Italian poetic canon and a valuable contribution to the study of women in literature.

Benedetto Croce was the foremost Italian philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century and his influence extended to every aspect of intellectual life in Italy. He played a significant, sometimes crucial, role in Italian politics, and his writing commanded attention throughout Europe, America, and beyond. In the last few years his contribution to various disciplines has been undergoing a re-evaluation in Italy. This collection continues that reassessment with an English-speaking audience in mind.The book is a collection of essays by scholars from various disciplines - philosophy, history, literature, and art history - covering the broad scope of Croce's life and work, from his early writings on local Neopolitan history in the 1890s to his activity as a public figure before and after the Second World War. In this much-needed addition to contemporary criticism one senses the depth and originality of his thought in the areas of history, national politics, rhetoric, and art. Including the first English-language discussion of Taccuini di lavoro, Croce's working diary, this is the first volume in English that provides a critical survey of Croce's major works and ideas, as well as fresh interpretations from a variety of contemporary points of view.

Feeding Fascism explores how women negotiated the politics of Italy's Fascist regime in their daily lives and how they fed their families through agricultural and industrial labour. The book looks at women's experiences of Fascism by examining the material world in which they lived in relation to their thoughts, feelings, and actions.Over the past decade, Diana Garvin has conducted extensive research in Italian museums, libraries, and archives. Feeding Fascism includes illustrations of rare cookbooks, kitchen utensils, cafeteria plans, and culinary propaganda to connect women's political beliefs with the places that they lived and worked and the objects that they owned and borrowed. Garvin draws on first-hand accounts, such as diaries, work songs, and drawings, that demonstrate how women and the Fascist state vied for control over national diet across many manifestations - cooking, feeding, and eating - to assert and negotiate their authority. Revealing the national stakes of daily choices, and the fine line between resistance and consent, Feeding Fascism attests to the power of food.

Poetry on Stage focuses on exchanges between the writers of the Italian neo-avant-garde with the actors, directors, and playwrights of the Nuovo Teatro. The book sheds light on a forgotten chapter of twentieth-century Italian literature, arguing that the theatre was the ideal incubator for stylistic and linguistic experiments and a means through which authors could establish direct contact with their audience and verify solutions to the practical and theoretical problems raised by their stances in politics and poetics. A robust analysis of a number of exemplary texts grounds these issues in the plays and poems produced at the time and connects them with the experimentations subsequently carried out by some of the same artists. In-depth interviews with four of the most influential figures in the field - critic Valentina Valentini, actor and director Pippo Di Marca, author Giuliano Scabia, and the late poet Nanni Balestrini - conclude the volume, providing invaluable first-hand testimony that brings to life the people and controversies discussed.

Since the late twentieth century, the Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco has been viewed as a triumphant proto-feminist icon: a woman who celebrated her sexuality, an outspoken champion of women and their worth, and an important intellectual and cultural presence in sixteenth-century Venice.In Veronica Franco in Dialogue, Marilyn Migiel provides a nuanced account of Franco's rhetorical strategies through a close analysis of her literary work. Focusing on the first fourteen poems in the Terze rime, a collection of Franco's poems published in 1575, Migiel looks specifically at back-and-forth exchanges between Franco and an unknown male author. Migiel argues that in order to better understand what Franco is doing in the poetic collection, it is essential to understand how she constructs her identity as author, lover, and sex worker in relation to this unknown male author.Veronica Franco in Dialogue accounts for the moments of ambivalence, uncertainty, and indirectness in Franco's poetry, as well as the polemicism and assertions of triumph. In doing so, it asks readers to consider their ideological investments in the stories we tell about early modern female authors and their cultural production.

The year 1932, the tenth anniversary of Mussolini’s March on Rome, was fascism’s Decennale. Commemorating Italian fascism’s seizure of power, the Decennale was celebrated by the regime in a deliberate attempt to radicalize the original movement and develop it into an imperial and racist regime.In Mussolini’s Decennale, Antonio Morena explores a cross-section of Italian culture during the Decennale. Studying literature, speeches, documentaries, films, textbooks, and the 1932 Exhibition, he discusses how the regime, its patrons, and even its critics all appropriated the historical events of 1922 for their political advantage. Positioning the 1932 anniversary celebrations as the crux of the fascist transition from conservatism to totalitarianism, Mussolini’s Decennale broadens our understanding of fascist ideology, cultural politics, and Realpolitik.

This unabridged, annotated English translation of Jacopo Caviceo’s Peregrino brings this popular Italian Renaissance romance to English readers for the first time.

Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court reconstructs the life, work, and legacy of an extraordinary woman and prolific writer of the seventeenth century.

On Amistà comprehensively examines the value of friendship in late medieval Italy.

Ariosto in the Machine Age reimagines reception theory through the modern afterlife of a Renaissance literary icon.