Books in the The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies series

In this monograph, Gregory M. Pell provides a full-length study on the poetry of Davide Rondoni, one of Italy's most active contemporary writers and thinkers. This book includes comparative studies of Jorie Graham, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Charles Wright, John Ashbery, Patrizia Fazzi, and Mario Luzi. As the first book in English on Davide Rondoni's poetry, this study explores how the Italian poet deals with art, and the places of art, in a way that transcends the notion of ekphrasis (or, verbal representation of pictorial art) to see poetry as the transcription of an experience with art, thus becoming a sort of anti-ekphrasis, or an atmospheric ekphrasis. The social and religious aspects of art take precedence over aesthetic concerns, without discounting them, in Rondoni's unsentimental poetry, which takes the form of recitative theatrical monologues. Thus, art becomes more than simple visual representation or the subject of an art history catalogue. Instead, in certain poets, such as Rondoni, we experience life through art's complete process: from the artist's originary idea to the work's execution to our interaction with it in the here and now.

The Unpopular Realism of Vincenzo Padula provides a microhistory of life in a Southern Italian province in the decade following Unification and 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 Sbrffiti. 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.'

This collection examines the multifaceted opus of Pier Paolo Pasolini through a contemporary critical lens. It offers new interpretations to some classic works such as Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom and Decameron while considering some lesser studied pieces, for example Orestiade and his Friulian verse.

The Author in Criticism offers a comparative analysis of the reception and circulation of Italo Calvino's works in the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Italy, proposing new views that arise from the analysis of the different phases and faces that characterize Calvino's transnational authorial profile.

This collection of essays charts the shifting representation of World War II in Italian literature and film from 1943 to the present. The essays examine film genre, cultural history, gender, the Holocaust, emotion studies, shame theory, and environmental studies.

Italian Prisoners of War in Pennsylvania examines the World War II experience of 1,200 Italian soldiers, detained at Letterkenny Army Depot. They provided valuable logistical, quartermaster, repair, and ordnance support that aided Allied operations, these POWs formed strong bonds with local citizens and Italian Americans, leaving a lasting legacy.

Italian Women at War explores Italian women's participation in war and conflict throughout Italy's modern history, beginning with the Unification and ending with the twentieth century. The essays in this volume, help to further the discussion on women's participation in violence, warfare, and political protest throughout Italy.

This book explores the oneiric in Italian cinema from filmic representations and visualizations of dreams, nightmares, hallucinations, and dream-like and hypnotic states, to dreams as cinematic allegories and metaphors and the theoretical frameworks applied to the investigation of this relationship.

This collection of essays charts the shifting representation of World War II in Italian literature and film from 1943 to the present. The essays examine film genre, cultural history, gender, the Holocaust, emotion studies, shame theory, and environmental studies.

This book 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 masters of their bodies as well as their stories and destinies.

The book is an against-the-grain study of Primo Levi's lifelong concerns about agency, both personal and political. It moves from fresh readings of his lesser-known short story and novels to a major reinterpretation of the testimonial works at the center of his legacy.

This collection examines the multifaceted opus of Pier Paolo Pasolini through a contemporary critical lens. It offers new interpretations to some classic works such as Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom and Decameron while considering some lesser studied pieces, for example Orestiade and his Friulian verse.

This critical volume offers an overview and close analysis of Italian women's autobiographical writings from the twentieth century, engaging with issues of form and content and identifying recurring paradigms. It will be of interest to students of Italian literature and culture, autobiographical studies, and gender studies.

This book analyzes the process of cultural production and consumption in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italy and the ways in which authors, composers, publishers, performers, journalists, and editors engage with the anxieties and aspirations of their diverse audiences.

This book focuses on the notion of desire in the Italian fin de siecle. It narrates how this notion informs the works of two of Italy's most prominent authors in the fin de siecle, Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D'Annunzio.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Artist and His Politics explores the politics of the leader of the Futurist art movement. Emerging in Italy in 1909, Futurism sought to propel Italy into the modern world, and is famously known for outlandish claims to want to destroy museums and libraries in order to speed this transition. Futurism, however, also had a much darker political side. It glorified war as the solution to many of Italy's ills, and was closely tied to the Fascist Regime. In this book, Ialongo focuses on Marinetti as the chief determinant of Futurist politics and explores how a seemingly revolutionary art movement, at one point having some support among revolutionary left-wing movements in Italy, could eventually become so intimately tied to the repressive Fascist regime. Ialongo traces Marinetti's politics from before the foundation of Futurism, through the Great War, and then throughout the twenty-year Fascist dictatorship, using a wide range of published and unpublished sources. Futurist politics are presented within the wider context of developments in Italy and Europe, and Ialongo further highlights how Marinetti's political choices influenced the art of his movement.

Imperial Designs is the first text in English to deal comprehensively with the subject of the Italian colonial experience in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recent scholarship on both the Liberal and Fascist Italian colonial enterprises centers on the Mediterranean and Northern Africa: expeditions, wars, ultimate occupation of territories, and their effect on Italy. This study looks at three Italian enclaves on the other side of the globe: Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. These present both a window into the Italian experience in the Far East and confirmation of imperial policy. Their very presence confirms the rhetoric of conquest. Journalist Luigi Barzini, Sr.; diplomats Salvago Raggi, Vare, and Ciano; various military personnel; and other foreign nationals tell the story through letters and diaries. They all interact with the local metropolitan and rural poor and cultivate a generalized colonial white man's detachment from their surroundings. A brief summary of the presence of chinoiserie in the Italian imaginary shows how the Celestial Empire has continued to function in the construction of Italian identity as part of the dichotomy between self and other.

Annie Chartres Vivanti: Transnational Politics, Identity, and Culture explores the workof British Italian writer Annie Chartres Vivanti (1866-1942). This volume provides amultidisciplinary approach to the study of Vivanti in order to analyze the diverse andcomplex writing experiences in which she engaged. Essays examine Vivanti's workthrough multiple perspectives, taking into account her politics and her career asjournalist, writer, and singer as well as her literary works.

This is the first edited volume in English on the Sicilian author Goliarda Sapienza, contextualizing her work within Italian and European literature. The essays in this volume examine Sapienza through multiple perspectives, taking into account the articulation of subjectivity through autobiographical writing and the complex representation of gender and sexual identities.

This book is divided into three sections. The first section deals with the general situation of Italian/American literature and its reception both in the United States and in Italy. It also discusses other social and cultural issues that pertain to Italian Americana. Section two consists of six chapters, each discussing a specific author; three dedicated to prose (Pietro di Donato, Mario Puzo, Luigi Barzini), three dedicated to poetry (Joseph Tusiani, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Rina Ferrarelli). Section three examines the current state of criticism dedicated to Italian/American literature, the second part focusing in on a number of specific works.

Dacia Maraini's Narratives of Survival: (Re)Constructed focuses on Dacia Maraini's narrative from about 1984 to 2004 and makes substantive use of her interviews and essays. While acknowledging the importance and ongoing validity of feminist scholarship of Maraini's work, this book seeks to take scholarship on Maraini beyond feminist readings by identifying a critical framework that cuts across gender and genre and thereby invites alternative readings. Using a method of close textual analysis, the author includes studies of men, children, animals, and imaginary characters in Maraini's narrative, analyzes language, character, motifs, and symbols, and considers some of Maraini's work in light of declining postmodern and emerging posthuman critical social theory. This critical framework identifies the paradigm of reconstruction as narrative center, both strategy and theme, of many of Maraini's works from this twenty-year-period and beyond. Reconstruction here signifies the strategies by which Maraini's deep investment in survival, which has its roots in the life threatening conditions she experienced as a small child in a WWII Japanese concentration camp, is enacted in a narrative re-building and re-constructing of personal memory, of various personal, social and political histories, of motherhood and maternal discourses, of crime stories, of postmodern fragmentation, and even of the process of erasure itself. Maraini's narrative is deeply attentive to the mechanisms that threaten survival of the body (and not just the woman's body); psychological and aesthetic survival; the survival in the Italian canon of a woman author's work, memory and legacy after her death; the survival of a drug-addicted and self-destructive younger generation; and by extension, collective and ecological survival. Never marked by nihilism or despair, Maraini's narratives offer the ethos of reconstruction as a variation on the ';begin again' that marks the end of many of her novels and, as we can see in Colomba, her own aesthetic process of renewal and regeneration. This book focuses primarily on Il treno per Helsinki (1984), Isolina (1985), some of her short stories for children, La nave per Kobe: Diari giapponesi di mia madre (2001), Buio (Strega Literary Prize, 1999), and Colomba (2004).

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.

Body of State offers a translation of Marco Baliani's acclaimed dramatic monologue, Corpo di stato, concerning the 1978 kidnapping and assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the terrorist Red Brigades. Corpo di stato was commissioned by Italian state television in 1998 to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the ';Moro Affair.' Baliani's monologue, refracted through the prism of the intervening twenty years, consists of a merciless self-examination, alternately anguished and affectionate, in an effort to confront his generations complicity in the dissolution of Italian politics in the wake of the national trauma of Moros murder. Through over a hundred performances since its 1998 debut, the piece has evolved in response to the forceful reactions of Italian audiences. The first draft of this English translation offered the supertitles for performances in Balianis 2009 U.S. tour, and was subsequently expanded to reflect the most recent version of the text.This unique volume features a translation of the dramatic monologue, embedding it in a context that richly documents the events. The volume includes a preface by translator and performance studies scholar Ron Jenkins, a critical introduction, Baliani's thoughts about the 1998 production for Italian television, an interview with Baliani and his artistic collaborator, Maria Maglietta, and the afterword they wrote in light of the 2009 tour. In addition, Body of State provides precious documentation in the form of reviews, contributed by scholars, students, and spectators, of Baliani's 2009 North American tour.A celebrated author and performer, Marco Baliani is well known as one of the originators of the ';theater of narration.' Starting in 1978, his first performances grew directly from his engagement in radical politics. In 1989 he adapted Heinrich von Kleist's novella, Kohlhaas (1989), into a riveting monologue which he performed on a bare stage, sitting on a chair for ninety minutes. Kohlhaas marked his passage to a ';pure' theater of narration and is today a classic of the genre. Since Kohlhaas, Baliani has shown interest in social, political, and literary themes. Recurring in his work are the psychological and ethical tensions that arise when the search for justice clashes with power or social injustice.

New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies, Volume 2: The Arts and History deals with practicing cultural studies by offering articles that are valuable for both scholars of Italian studies and students interested in a cultural studies approach. Divided in four sections, the articles included offer complex approaches to literature, film, the visual arts, and a particular moment in Italian history with which Italians are still coming to terms, fascism.

This book on cultural studies aims to identify the status of the field in Italian cultural studies. It contains articles that will interest a variety of undergraduate and graduate classes and it is an invaluable resource for scholars of Italian studies.

This book focuses on the autobiographical poetry of early twentieth century author Antonia Pozzi and her lifelong friend and fellow poet, Vittorio Sereni. Antonia Pozzi, an author whose popularity in Italy has increased dramatically in the past few years, was a young girl during the First World War. She was born into a wealthy and influential family, and, after the rise of Fascism, her father was a prominent state official. In 1938 Pozzi committed suicide at the age of twenty-six. Her major collection of poems, Parole, was published posthumously. Pozzi's best friend, brother and most devoted confidant, Vittorio Sereni, is a more recognizable figure in Italian literary history. Born in 1913, a year after Pozzi, he served in the Italian Army during World War II, and was held in an allied prison camp in Algeria during the last years of the war. While Sereni is by far the better-known author, his response to the war experience and, particularly, to imprisonment recalls Pozzi's work on a number of levels. In the ';diaries' of both authors, autobiography functions as a means of constantly reasserting the self as a unique and separate individual against the totalizing forces of Fascist propaganda.

Mussolini's National Project in Argentina offers new perspectives on the politics of identity formation while providing a transatlantic example of the dynamic interplay between the Italian state and its emigrant communities. It is in short, a transnational perspective on what it means to belong to a nation.