ItalianistPub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2021.1956766
Marco Malvestio
{"title":"New Italian Weird? Definizioni della letteratura italiana del soprannaturale nel nuovo millennio","authors":"Marco Malvestio","doi":"10.1080/02614340.2021.1956766","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2021.1956766","url":null,"abstract":"SOMMARIO Negli anni Ottanta, in seguito alla pubblicazione del fortunato studio di Tzvetan Todorov, in Italia si assistette a un ricco e animato dibattito sul concetto di fantastico, che mirava a rileggere la tradizione letteraria italiana attraverso questo strumento critico. Cionondimeno, autori e critici coinvolti in questo dibattito (tra i quali Italo Calvino e Gianfranco Contini), limitarono la categoria di fantastico a prodotti intellettuali ed elitari, trascurando al contrario forme popolari di letteratura e contaminazioni transmediali. In anni più recenti, gli autori italiani hanno sviluppato un rinnovato interesse per la narrativa del soprannaturale, prendendo ispirazione tanto dalla tradizione anglo-americana della letteratura weird quanto dal movimento letterario New Weird. Attraverso un’analisi delle opere e delle dichiarazioni di poetica degli autori italiani contemporanei di narrativa weird, il presente articolo esplora questa nuova voga letteraria sottolineando la persistente influenza che su di essa esercita il fantastico.","PeriodicalId":42720,"journal":{"name":"Italianist","volume":"41 1","pages":"116 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48705132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ItalianistPub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2021.1922177
Elisa Bolchi
{"title":"Filling the Void: Virginia Woolf and the Feminism of Difference in Italy","authors":"Elisa Bolchi","doi":"10.1080/02614340.2021.1922177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2021.1922177","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Using unpublished archival material, this article analyses the reception of Virginia Woolf in the Milanese feminist context of the late 1970s, attempting to understand the role Woolf’s work played in the theoretical development of the feminism of difference in Italy. The study focuses on two key texts: the Italian publication of Three Guineas by the feminist press La Tartaruga; and the Catalogo giallo, the second publication of the Milan-based Libreria delle donne, which played a vital role in the evolution of the feminism of difference.","PeriodicalId":42720,"journal":{"name":"Italianist","volume":"41 1","pages":"97 - 115"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/02614340.2021.1922177","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47465581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ItalianistPub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2021.1944482
K. Driscoll
{"title":"‘La donna di poche parole’ from Page to Stage: Envoicing Enchantment in Epic Poetry and Early Opera","authors":"K. Driscoll","doi":"10.1080/02614340.2021.1944482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2021.1944482","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT ‘Alle donne si addice il silenzio’: in early modern Italy these words aligned women’s public eloquence with wayward behaviour and their silence with chastity, thus generating significant and widespread debate. This essay traces how such considerations emerged across fiction and history in Ariosto’s and Tasso’s epic poems, and in early operatic representations of their siren-enchantresses: the Orlando furioso’s surprisingly speechless Alcina, and the Gerusalemme liberata’s loquaciously alluring Armida. The salvific qualities of Armida’s speech and song – her ‘vocal expression’, to follow Adriana Cavarero – influenced the development of female personalities on the seventeenth-century operatic stage. The performance practices analysed herein bring together threads of intertextuality and intermedial reception. Such interweaving of materials and modes in the construction of early opera’s musical poetics, which recalls the art of entrelacement, illustrates how poets, librettists, and composers transformed the complex coordination of agency and obstacles into which women – fictional and historical – were often embedded.","PeriodicalId":42720,"journal":{"name":"Italianist","volume":"41 1","pages":"1 - 22"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42559508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ItalianistPub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2021.1987762
Barbara Olla
{"title":"Towards a Hermeneutics of Myth: Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Unexplored Philosophical Relationship with Antonio Banfi and His Milanese Entourage","authors":"Barbara Olla","doi":"10.1080/02614340.2021.1987762","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2021.1987762","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study aims to add new evidence to the complex relationship between Gadda and philosophy in the years after his formal abandonment of university study at the Università Statale in Milan in 1929. The examination of published and unpublished material held in the Fondo Roscioni at the Archivi della Trivulziana (Milan) and in the Archivio Contemporaneo Alessandro Bonsanti (Florence) allows us to redefine the chronological limits of Gadda’s philosophical vocation and to outline a previously unknown relationship between the writer and the Milanese academic and philosophical circles of the 1930s and early 1940s (Antonio Banfi; Luciano Anceschi; Raffaele De Grada; Enzo Paci; Elio Vittorini; Giansiro Ferrata; Alberto Vigevani). The last part of this study will focus on the theoretical impact the Milanese academic ‘school’ may have had on Gadda’s aesthetics.","PeriodicalId":42720,"journal":{"name":"Italianist","volume":"41 1","pages":"78 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46901735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ItalianistPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2020.1886752
K. Piechocki
{"title":"Compulsive Masculinity: Hercules and Early Italian-Style Opera in Paris","authors":"K. Piechocki","doi":"10.1080/02614340.2020.1886752","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2020.1886752","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay investigates the rise of Italian-style opera in Paris through the lens of Ercole amante, an opera composed by Francesco Cavalli to a libretto by Francesco Buti for the wedding of the future French king Louis XIV and the Spanish infanta Maria Teresa in 1660. In the libretto Buti explores the blend of two distinct, and yet intertwined, preoccupations: the investment in the rise of operatic poetics as a new literary genre and the anxiety about the potential vulnerability of the aristocratic body in a time of rising absolutism. Translated after Cardinal Mazarin’s death into French as Hercule amoureux, Ercole amante imagines the French king in the form of the mythological figure of Hercules. Through the lens of the mythological figure, Buti charts the dual strands of genre and gender as a single enterprise while engaging with questions such as male filiation in the context of the French Salic Law.","PeriodicalId":42720,"journal":{"name":"Italianist","volume":"40 1","pages":"400 - 418"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/02614340.2020.1886752","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42077305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ItalianistPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2020.1879465
Jessica Goethals
{"title":"Worth Its Salt: Margherita Costa’s Ridiculous Defence of Buffoonery","authors":"Jessica Goethals","doi":"10.1080/02614340.2020.1879465","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2020.1879465","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The first comedy published by a woman in Italy was singer-writer Margherita Costa’s Li buffoni (1641). Intertwining elements of erudite comedy, commedia dell’arte, and especially ‘ridiculous comedy’, this burlesque work stages seventeenth-century debates about comedic acting. Costa challenges efforts by arte predecessors such as Pier Maria Cecchini and Nicolò Barbieri to ennoble their art, distancing the stage actor from his clownish cousin by rebending the genre back to buffoonery, which she declares better suited to the theatrical tastes of the Seicento Medici court. Hers is a hybrid script composed almost exclusively of the parti ridicole. This essay examines Costa’s comedy in relation to these genre debates and to the apologia for buffoonery published by Bernardino Ricci, her dedicatee and titular buffoon, traced through her use of the metaphor of salty wit. It concludes with Costa’s return to these questions in a subsequent manuscript, and a brief look at a modern adaptation of the play.","PeriodicalId":42720,"journal":{"name":"Italianist","volume":"40 1","pages":"362 - 381"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/02614340.2020.1879465","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41578033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ItalianistPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2020.1893973
E. Nicholson
{"title":"Crossing Borders with Satyrs, the Irrepressible Genre-Benders of Pastoral Tragicomedy","authors":"E. Nicholson","doi":"10.1080/02614340.2020.1893973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2020.1893973","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Although the ancient Athenian satyr-play was the model for Italian Renaissance pastoral tragicomedy, its chorus of singing and dancing satyrs was suppressed, and these same essential characters were often reduced to a solitary outsider figure representing a violent threat rather than a regenerative force for human communities. My essay asks how and why this reduction became a prevalent dramatic choice, as well as how and why the genre-bending spirit of satyrs nevertheless persisted, with distinct modulations, in many Italian and English plays. Historiographical and theoretical insights from the field of animal studies shape my comparative analysis: these include Donna Haraway’s pluralistic and playfully companionate models of ‘natureculture’ and respect. A key focus is on tensions between anthropocentric and theriophilic attitudes – also expressed through the figure of the ‘Wild-Man’ – and how they inform pastoral productions from Giraldi Cinzio’s Egle to Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, revealing the protean vitality of buffoonish, irrepressibly theatrical satyrs.","PeriodicalId":42720,"journal":{"name":"Italianist","volume":"40 1","pages":"342 - 361"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/02614340.2020.1893973","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41624728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ItalianistPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2020.1901454
R. Henke
{"title":"Genre Decorum as Precondition of Renaissance Genre-Bending","authors":"R. Henke","doi":"10.1080/02614340.2020.1901454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2020.1901454","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Early modern arguments by Giason Denores, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and others for genre integrity and against genre mixing are worth examining on their own terms. For one thing, the claim for genre integrity was often accompanied by a fierce belief in the political relevance of dramatic genres to which we today would be very sympathetic. Moreover, many early modern approaches to mixed genres, such as Battista Guarini’s argument for tragicomedy on the basis of both his play Il pastor fido and a series of theoretical treatises he wrote against his antagonist Giason Denores, actually depended upon the principle of genre integrity. Early modern tragicomedy, as articulated by Guarini and as practised by Shakespeare in his late plays, was designed not to contrast unstably comedic and tragedic effects and perspectives, unlike Beckett’s modern tragicomedy Waiting for Godot, for example, but to fashion its own, aesthetically unified form under the aegis of mixture.","PeriodicalId":42720,"journal":{"name":"Italianist","volume":"40 1","pages":"327 - 341"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/02614340.2020.1901454","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47677814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ItalianistPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2020.1896257
T. Carter
{"title":"Epyllia and Epithalamia: Some Narrative Frames for Early Opera","authors":"T. Carter","doi":"10.1080/02614340.2020.1896257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2020.1896257","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The first operas were often associated with princely wedding festivities, such as Jacopo Peri’s Euridice (Florence, 1600) or Claudio Monteverdi’s Arianna (Mantua, 1608). They formed part of a series of indoor and outdoor entertainments which, in turn, might plausibly be compared with the fresco cycles often commissioned to mark such nuptials. This also prompts reading them as epyllia, i.e. stories within the ‘story’ presented by their festivities as a whole. The concept is useful because their literary sources are usually themselves epyllia in an epithalamic context, as with Catullus’s Poem 64 on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Representing such embedded narratives further encouraged multiple allegories through intertextual association. Situating early opera in the context of the broader tropes of princely celebration further helped overcome one absurdity of the genre: the fact that people sing.","PeriodicalId":42720,"journal":{"name":"Italianist","volume":"40 1","pages":"382 - 399"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/02614340.2020.1896257","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59387659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ItalianistPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2020.1886758
Eugenio Refini
{"title":"‘Parole tronche et imperfette’: The Lament as a ‘Mode’ across Poetical and Musical Genres","authors":"Eugenio Refini","doi":"10.1080/02614340.2020.1886758","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2020.1886758","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT A paradoxical feature of the lament as a poetical and musical genre is the imbalance between the supposedly spontaneous expression of emotional turmoil and the artificial dimension of its artistic representation. Embedded in the lament since antiquity, such tension becomes particularly prominent in the early modern period, when the development of the ‘lamenting mode’ in poetry and vocal music facilitated experimentation in both domains. After reconsidering the rhetorical status of the lament, this essay explores the ways in which one specific lament – Olimpia’s from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso – moves across mediums and genres. More precisely, by focusing on the transition from ottava rima to the free-verse recitative style of seventeenth-century lamenti and cantatas, the article argues that the formal instability intrinsic to the lament exposes the limitations of any attempt to represent the utterance of a lamenting character as well as the expressive potential conveyed by its quintessentially performative nature.","PeriodicalId":42720,"journal":{"name":"Italianist","volume":"40 1","pages":"441 - 462"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/02614340.2020.1886758","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48684426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}