Books in the Italian Modernities series

This book draws on a growing body of work in the history and theory of children on film and applies some of these new approaches to Italian cinema for the first time. In considering issues such as gender, the transnational, mourning and filmmaking itself the book maps out a revised understanding of the child in Italian film.

Fictions of Appetite explores and investigates the aesthetic significance of images of food, appetite and consumption in a body of modernist literature published in Italian between 1905 and 1939. The corpus examined includes novels, short stories, poems, essays and plays by F.T. Marinetti, Aldo Palazzeschi, Massimo Bontempelli, Paola Masino and Luigi Pirandello. The book underlines the literary relevance and symbolic implications of the culinary sign suggesting a link between the crisis of language and subjectivity usually associated with modernism and figures of consumption and corporeal self-obliteration in alimentary discourse. In revisiting these works under label of modernism, which has traditionally been shunned in the Italian critical field, the volume brings critical discourse on early twentieth-century Italian literature closely into line with that of other Western literatures. The author argues that an alimentary perspective not only sheds striking new light on each of the texts examined, but also illustrates the signifying power of the culinary sign, its relations to the aesthetic sphere and its prominent role in the construction of a modernist sensibility.

In the nineteenth century a woman's place was considered to be in the home. During the Risorgimento and the years following the Unification of Italy in 1861, economic, political and social changes enabled women to engage in pursuits that had previously been the exclusive domain of men. This book traces this shift in cultural perception.

¿Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; ¿ they are the life, the soul of reading¿. So declared Laurence Sterne in his Tristram Shandy, the greatest of all monuments to digression. The modern Italian novel was not slow to pick up on Sterne¿s lesson. This book examines the workings of digression in the novels of five major Italian authors ¿ Manzoni, Dossi, Pirandello, Gadda, and Calvino ¿ from the birth of the modern novel in the early 19th century to the era of postmodernist experimentation. Digression is shown to play a role in defining not only the poetics of the five authors, but also their underlying world-views, their cognitive and philosophical dispositions. The book explores the tensions digression engenders in narrative texts, by creating extra time within narration, disrupting the readers¿ expectations, and generating an act of reflection upon the narrative process itself. What emerges is a sense of the vitality and flexibility of the device of digression in the Italian tradition, both within the canonical novel and the anti-novel, as well as an illuminating and original web of relations between the five authors under analysis.