Description
Book SynopsisThis authoritative and vividly written book brings readers into the heart of Italian literary culture from the 1690s to the present.
Trade Review“An intelligent and engaging blend of cultural and literary history, this volume provides a highly readable overview of modern Italian literature, which ranges from the eighteenth century to today. A most valuable study for both experts and students.”
Rebecca West, University of Chicago
“A brilliant book that moves with agility through the centuries, authors, and historical events. It is a cultural and literary guide that any student of Italian should rely on.”
Graziella Parati, Dartmouth College
“This is a superb, stimulating and lucid work of synthesis, tracing the evolution of Italian literature from the late seventeenth century to the present day. As well as revisiting major figures and others lost in the archive, the book uses the literary field to explore a fascinating series of subterranean patterns in Italy’s modern cultural history.”
Robert Gordon, University of Cambridge
Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION: An Overview of Modern Italian Literature
PART I: The Long Eighteenth Century (1690-1815)
Chapter One: Cross-currents of modernity
1.1. This is Arcadia
1.2. New states, new thinkers
Chapter Two: Enlightenment and the public arena
2.1. Journalism, theatre and the book trade in Venice
2.2. Enlightenment and reform from Naples to Milan
Chapter Three: Literature and revolution
3.1. Italy and France
3.2. Alfieri: life and drama
3.3. Foscolo: between classicism and romanticism
PART II: Literature and Unification (1816-1900)
Chapter Four: Romantic Italy
4.1. Milan 1816
4.2. Florence 1827
4.3. Leopardi: the challenge of poetry
Chapter Five: Inventing the nation
5.1. Manzoni: the responsibility of the writer
5.2. History and fiction
5.3. Literature and the people
5.4. Memory, monuments and the national past
Chapter Six: Making the nation
6.1. The literary culture of Unificaton
6.2. The artist as observer: verismo and the social
6.3. Looking in: domesticity and the literary market
PART III: From modernism to the market (1900 to the present)
Chapter Seven: Modernism and the crisis of the literary subject
7. 1. The search for identity
7.2. War, technology and the arts
7.3. Narratives of selfhood: the subjective turn in fiction
Chapter Eight: Literature, Fascism and Anti-Fascism
8.1. Writing and the regime
8.2. The social condition of intellectuals
8.3. Testing the limits of the novel
8.4. Resistance, Reconstruction and Neo-realism
Chapter Nine: From the avant-garde to the market-place
9.1. The last avant-garde?
9.2. The widening of culture
9.3. A minimalist postmodernism: the poetics of attention
9.4. Epilogue: a weekend in April
Primary References
Secondary References
General Bibliography
