Search results for ""Author Adrienne Ward""

Pagodas in Play examines the representation of China in nine Italian operas of the eighteenth century. It focuses specifically on libretti, analyzing them as texts produced in a variety of interpenetrating cultural contexts: the general European fascination with the Middle Kingdom; developments in Italian literary, theatrical, and operatic realms; Enlightenment ideologies; and the heterogeneity of the Italian states. With exemplary scholarship Adrienne Ward explores how Italians appropriated prevailing notions about the Celestial Empire and used them productively in a form of entertainment widely comprehensible in eighteenth-century Europe. The Chinese characters, places, objects, and ideas staged in Italian heroic operas (opera serie) and comic operas (opera buffe) provide a rich picture of how such authors as Pietro Metastasio, Apostolo Zeno, Carlo Goldoni, Giambattista Lorenzi, and Domenico Lalli conceived of the Celestial Empire. Furthermore, the texts and performance practices tell a detailed story about China's versatile role in how Italians addressed local and transnational developments. Ward demonstrates how the fertile exploitation of perceptions of China in Settecento Italian opera challenges the idea that only in the twentieth century has Orientalism shifted from a geographical paradigm to one in which essentialist characteristics are deterritorialized and manipulated in the interests of competing new world elites. Indeed, discrete conceptualizations of Chineseness were mobilized for local purposes, far removed from questions of actual East vs. West, and from nationalist and/or colonialist projects. Pagodas in Play will appeal to students and scholars of the Enlightenment, Orientalism, Italian Studies, and Opera Studies, as well as to historians of European sinology, who will be afforded a fascinating view onto a "stage" until now unrevealed.

Read more less

In 1826 Angela Veronese, a gardener’s daughter, wrote and published the first modern autobiography by an Italian woman. Veronese’s account focuses on her unique experience as a peasant girl who came of age among the Venetian elite, and details how she attained a certain renown in and out of Italy by improvising, writing, and publishing her own lyrics. Courting Celebrity is a bilingual annotated edition of Veronese’s autobiography. To better elucidate Veronese’s thinking, the book includes the autobiographical writing of another contemporary Italian poet, Teresa Bandettini, a well-known Tuscan poet-improviser. The book offers a substantial sample of Veronese’s poems, translated and in the original. These compositions, together with detailed bibliographical documentation, point to the success of Veronese’s autobiographical enterprise and offer an unparalleled view of both high society and popular culture at the time. Courting Celebrity illustrates women’s practice in two key literary genres, poetry and autobiography, and illuminates the strategies of women’s self-fashioning and pursuit of celebrity.

Read more less