Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy


Book Description

This groundbreaking study considers Italian Romanticism and the modern myth of Italy. Ranging across European and international borders, he examines the metaphors, facts, and fictions about Italy that were born in the Romantic age and continue to haunt the global literary imagination.




My Two Italies


Book Description

A child of Italian immigrants and scholar of Italian literature paints an intimate portrait that blends together history and the unusual to show how his 'two Italies' join and clash in unexpected ways.




Classicism and Romanticism in Italian Literature


Book Description

In 1816 a violent literary quarrel engulfed Bourbon Restoration Italy. On one side the Romantics wanted an opening up of Italian culture towards Europe, and on the other the Classicists favoured an inward-looking Italy. Giacomo Leopardi wrote a Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry aiming to contribute to the debate from a new perspective.




Printed Media in Fin-de-siecle Italy


Book Description

"The Unification of Italy in 1870 heralded a period of unprecedented change. While successive Liberal governments pursued imperial ventures and took Italy into World War One on the Allied side, on the domestic front technological advance, the creation of a national transport network, the expansion of state education, internal migration to cities and the rise of political associations all contributed to the rapid expansion of the print industry and the development of new and highly diversified reading publics. Drawing on publishers'archives, letters, diaries, and printed material, this book provide the most up-to-date research into the printed media - books, magazines and journals - in Italy between 1870 and 1914. With essays on publishers and reading communities, the professionalization of the role of journalist and writer, children's literature, book illustrations, and printed media in colonial territories among others, this book is intended for those with interests in cultural production and consumption and questions of nation-formation and nationhood in and outside Italy. With the contributions: Ann Hallamore Caesar, Gabriella Romani- Introduction John Davis- Media, Markets and Modernity: The Italian Case, 1870-1915 Maria Grazia Lolla- Reader/Power: The Politics and Poetics of Reading in Post-Unification Italy Joseph Luzzi- Verga Economicus: Language, Money, and Identity in I Malavoglia and Mastro-don Gesualdo Olivia Santovetti- The Cliche of the Romantic Female Reader and the Paradox of Novelistic Illusion: Federico De Roberto's L'Illusione (1891) Francesca Billiani- Intellettuali militanti, funzionari e tecnologici, etica ed estetica in tre riviste fiorentine d'inizio secolo: Il Regno, La Voce, e Lacerba (1903-1914) Luca Somigli- Towards a Literary Modernity all'italiana: A Note on F. T. Marinetti's Poesia Silvia Valisa- Casa editrice Sonzogno. Mediazione culturale, circuiti del sapere ed innovazione tecnologica nell'Italia unificata (1861-1900) Matteo Salvadore- At the Borders of 'Dark Africa': Italian Expeditions to Ethiopia and the Bollettino della Societa Geografica Italiana, 1867-1887 Ombretta Frau- L'editore delle signore: Licinio Cappelli e la narrativa femminile fra Otto e Novecento Cristina Gragnani- Il lettore in copertina. Flirt rivista di splendore e declino (Primo tempo: 1897-1902) Fiorenza Weinapple- Abbiamo fatto l'Italia. Adesso si tratta di fare gli Italiani. Il Programma di educazione nazionale del Secolo XX Fabio Gadducci, Mirko Tavosanis- Printers, Poets, Publishers and Painters: The First Years of the Giornale per i bambini John P. Welle- The Magic Lantern, the Illustrated Book, and the Beginnings of the Culture Industry: Intermediality in Carlo Collodi's La lanterna magica di Giannettino"




The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism


Book Description

TThe Oxford Handbook to European Romanticism brings together leading scholars in the field to examine the intellectual, literary, philosophical, and political elements of European Romanticism. The book focuses on the cultural history of the period extending from the French Revolution to the uprisings of 1848. It begins with a series of chapters examining key texts written by major writers in languages including: French; German; Italian; Spanish; Russian; Hungarian; Greek; and Polish amongst others. A second section then explores the naturally inter-disciplinary quality of Romanticism, exemplified by the different discourses with which writers of the time set up an internal, comparative dynamic. These chapters highlight the sense a discourse gives of being written knowledgeably against other pretenders to completeness or comprehensiveness of self-understanding of the time. Discourses typically advance their own claims to resume European culture, collaborating with and at the same time trying to assimilate each other in the process. The main examples featured here are: history; geography; drama; theology; language; philosophy; political theory; the sciences; and the media. Each chapter offers an original and individual interpretation of an inherently comparative world of individual writers and the discursive idioms to which they are historically subject. Together the forty-one chapters provide a comprehensive and provocative overview of European Romanticism.




Byron and Italy


Book Description

Winner of the Elma Dangerfield Prize 2018 Byron in Italy – Venetian debauchery, Roman sight-seeing, revolution, horse-riding and swimming, sword-brandishing and pistol-shooting, the poet’s ‘last attachment’ – forms part of the fabric of Romantic mythology. Yet Byron’s time in Italy was crucial to his development as a writer, to Italy’s sense of itself as a nation, to Europe’s perceptions of national identity and to the evolution of Romanticism across Europe. In this volume, Byron scholars from Britain, Europe and beyond re-assess the topic of ‘Byron and Italy’ in all its richness and complexity. They consider Byron’s relationship to Italian literature, people, geography, art, religion and politics, and discuss his navigations between British and Italian identities.




British Romanticism in European Perspective


Book Description

What, and when, is British Romanticism, if seen not in island isolation but cosmopolitan integration with European Romantic literature, history and culture? The essays here range from poetry and the novel to science writing, philosophy, visual art, opera and melodrama; from France and Germany to Italy and Bosnia.




The Italian Idea


Book Description

A dual-perspective study of how English engagement with Italy, and the work of Italian exiles in London, radicalised Romantic poetry.




Botticelli's Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance


Book Description

A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 “Brilliantly conceived and executed, Botticelli's Secret is a riveting search for buried treasure.” —Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve Some five hundred years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created works of unearthly beauty. A star of Florence’s art world, he was commissioned by a member of the city’s powerful Medici family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all one hundred cantos of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, the ultimate visual homage to that “divine” poet. This sparked a gripping encounter between poet and artist, between the religious and the secular, between the earthly and the evanescent, recorded in exquisite drawings by Botticelli that now enchant audiences worldwide. Yet after a lifetime of creating masterpieces including Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Botticelli declined into poverty and obscurity. His Dante project remained unfinished. Then the drawings vanished for over four hundred years. The once famous Botticelli himself was forgotten. The nineteenth-century rediscovery of Botticelli’s Dante drawings brought scholars and art lovers to their knees: this work embodied everything the Renaissance had come to mean. From Botticelli’s metaphorical rise from the dead in Victorian England to the emergence of eagle-eyed connoisseurs like Bernard Berenson and Herbert Horne in the early twentieth century, and even the rescue of precious art during World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the posthumous story of Botticelli’s Dante drawings is, if anything, even more dramatic than their creation. A combination of artistic detective story and rich intellectual history, Botticelli’s Secret shows not only how the Renaissance came to life, but also how Botticelli’s art helped bring it about—and, most important, why we need the Renaissance and all that it stands for today.




The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism offers a comprehensive guide to the literature and thought of the Romantic period, and an overview of the latest research on this topic. Written by a team of international experts, the Handbook analyses all aspects of the Romantic movement, pinpointing its different historical phases and analysing the intellectual and political currents which shaped them. It gives particular attention to devolutionary trends, exploring the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish strands in 'British' Romanticism and assessing the impact of the constitutional changes that brought into being the 'United Kingdom' at a time of revolutionary turbulence and international conflict. It also gives extensive coverage to the publishing and reception history of Romantic writing, highlighting the role of readers, reviewers, publishers, and institutions in shaping Romantic literary culture and transmitting its ideas and values. Divided into ten sections, each containing four or five chapters, the Handbook covers key themes and concepts in Romantic studies as well as less chartered topics such as freedom of speech, literature and drugs, Romantic oratory, and literary uses of dialect. All the major male and female Romantic authors are included along with numerous lesser-known writers, the emphasis throughout being on the diversity of Romantic writing and the complexities and internal divisions of the culture that sustained it. The volume strikes a balance between familiarity and novelty to provide an accessible guide to current thinking and a conceptual reorganization of this fast-moving field.