Gadda Goes to War


Book Description

Introduces and analyses a stage performance of texts by Italian Modernist writer Carlo Emilio GaddaWhen do we start going to war and why? And what did it mean to go to war from World War I to World War II and beyond, in Italy, before and after Mussolini, before and after, that is, that warring spirit of the age which keeps nations in fighting mode? Both time specific and universal, these questions are explored in this book through a unique combination of scholarly and theatrical performance based on the war diaries and a belated anti-Mussolini pamphlet by Italy's greatest Modernist writer Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973). These works were adapted for the stage by actor, playwright and director Fabrizio Gifuni in 2010, and are now presented for the first time in English, supplemented with facing Italian text, a dvd of the performance with English subtitles, and an engaging, thought-provoking scholarly guide to Italy's own Joyce purposely produced for the Anglophone audience by the Edinburgh Gadda Projects Team.Key FeaturesIntroduces Italy's greatest Modernist writer to the Anglophone audience in five sections: Poetics, Circulation, Translation, Staging and ResourcesProvides a flexible teaching and learning aid for work across subject areasPresents the first significant new English Gadda translation since the 1960sIncludes the original Italian texts (with facing English translation) and the dvd of the Italian performance (with English subtitles)Fabrizio Gifuni is one of Italy's leading actors. His career successfully combines cinema and theatre. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious Federico Fellini Prize for his outstanding career in the arts. Federica G. Pedriali is Professor of Literary Metatheory and Modern Italian Studies and Head of Italian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the Founder and Director of the Edinburgh Gadda Projects, General Editor of the Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies and Director of the Italo-Scottish Research Centre.




Italian Literature since 1900 in English Translation


Book Description

Providing the most complete record possible of texts by Italian writers active after 1900, this annotated bibliography covers over 4,800 distinct editions of writings by some 1,700 Italian authors. Many entries are accompanied by useful notes that provide information on the authors, works, translators, and the reception of the translations. This book includes the works of Pirandello, Calvino, Eco, and more recently, Andrea Camilleri and Valerio Manfredi. Together with Robin Healey’s Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation, also published by University of Toronto Press in 2011, this volume makes comprehensive information on translations from Italian accessible for schools, libraries, and those interested in comparative literature.




Shakespeare, Italy, and Transnational Exchange


Book Description

This interdisciplinary, transhistorical collection brings together international scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature to offer new perspectives on the vibrant engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and politics, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Chapters address the intricate, two-way exchange between Shakespeare and Italy: how the artistic and intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy shaped Shakespeare’s drama in his own time, and how the afterlife of Shakespeare’s work and reputation in Italy since the eighteenth century has permeated Italian drama, poetry, opera, novels, and film. Responding to exciting recent scholarship on Shakespeare and Italy, as well as transnational theatre, this volume moves beyond conventional source study and familiar questions about influence, location, and adaptation to propose instead a new, evolving paradigm of cultural interchange. Essays in this volume, ranging in methodology from archival research to repertory study, are unified by an interest in how Shakespeare’s works represent and enact exchanges across the linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries separating England and Italy. Arranged chronologically, chapters address historically-contingent cultural negotiations: from networks, intertextual dialogues, and exchanges of ideas and people in the early modern period to questions of authenticity and formations of Italian cultural and national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They also explore problems of originality and ownership in twentieth- and twenty-first-century translations of Shakespeare’s works, and new settings and new media in highly personalized revisions that often make a paradoxical return to earlier origins. This book captures, defines, and explains these lively, shifting currents of cultural interchange.




Mobilizing Cultural Identities in the First World War


Book Description

This book tackles cultural mobilization in the First World War as a plural process of identity formation and de-formation. It explores eight different settings in which individuals, communities and conceptual paradigms were mobilized. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it interrogates one of the most challenging facets of the history of the Great War, one that keeps raising key questions on the way cultures respond to times of crisis. Mobilization during the First World War was a major process of material and imaginative engagement unfolding on a military, economic, political and cultural level, and existing identities were dramatically challenged and questioned by the whirl of discourses and representations involved.




Gadda Goes to War


Book Description

Introduces and analyses stage performances of texts by Italian Modernist writer Carlo Emilio Gadda, Italy's own Joyce. Includes the Italian texts (with English translation) and the dvd of the Italian performance (with English subtitles).




Creative Entanglements


Book Description

This groundbreaking study of Gadda's narrative form identifies Gadda's complex 'baroque' style as not merely an aesthetic conceit, but an expression of modern alienation and of loss, grief, and the need for solitude in the face of a fragmented reality.




Un-representing the Great War


Book Description

This collection of essays investigates the multifarious meanings of the Great War considered from a multifaceted perspective as the event that opens up the cultural history of the 20th century. After an introduction delineating ‘unrepresentability’, the core methodological issue of the book, the volume brings together many different strands of analysis and is divided into two main sections: the first provides a cultural and philosophical framework while the second explores specific linguistic and literary issues. Given the variety of perspectives and methodological approaches adopted by the contributors, the volume offers original and useful insights into WWI. The underlying rationale of the book, remaining faithful to the catastrophe of the war, without transforming it into a mere object of scientific investigation or ideological interpretation, helps to shed light on contemporary scenarios.




The 44th Legacy


Book Description

"A leader more focused on his legacy than meeting the demands of his office will fail in both." This review of Barack Obama's legacy as the forty-fourth president of the United States is no hymn of praise. Those who support him and believe he has left an admirable legacy will sharply disagree, and may even say it's motivated by prejudice and overly critical. They are, of course, entitled to their opinions. But, having voted twice for his presidency in 2008 and 2012, that is not an assessment with which H. H. Charles can agree. The impetus for undertaking this "chronicle" of Obama's "legacy" starts with the presidency of George W. Bush, the president who is first and foremost responsible for all the bloodshed, genocide, and crimes against humanity that plagues the Middle East to this day, and which continues unabated into the indefinite future.




Gadda and Beckett: Storytelling, Subjectivity and Fracture


Book Description

"While the writing of Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) is renowned for its linguistic and narrative proliferation, the best-known works of Samuel Beckett (1906-89) are minimalist, with a clear fondness for subtraction and abstraction. Despite these face-value differences, a close reading of the two authors' early prose writings reveals some surprisingly affinitive concerns, rooted in their profoundly troubled relationship with the literary medium and an unceasing struggle for expression of an incoherent reality and a similarly unfathomable self. Situating Gadda and Beckett at the heart of the debate of late European modernism, this study not only contests the position of'insularity' frequently ascribed to both authors by critical consensus, but it also rethinks some of Gadda's plurilingual and macaronic features by situating them in the context of the turn-of-the-century Sprachkrise, or crisis of language. In a close analysis of the primary texts which engages with the latest findings in empirical research, Wehling-Giorgi casts fresh light on the central notions of textual and linguistic fragmentation and provides a new post-Lacanian analysis of the fractured self in Gadda's and Beckett's narrative."




Italy and the Military


Book Description

This book sheds new light on the role of the military in Italian society and culture during war and peacetime by bringing together a whole host of contributors across the interdisciplinary spectrum of Italian Studies. Divided into five thematic units, this volume examines the continuous and multifaceted impact of the military on modern and contemporary Italy. The Italian context offers a particularly fertile ground for studying the cultural impact of the military because the institution was used not only for defensive/offensive purposes, but also to unify the country and to spread ideas of socio-cultural and technological development across its diverse population.