Italian StudiesPub Date : 2023-06-16DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2208937
Leonora Masini
{"title":"We Will Set You Free: Representations of the ‘Antislavery Argument’ in British and Italian Missionary Films (1925–1939)","authors":"Leonora Masini","doi":"10.1080/00751634.2023.2208937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2023.2208937","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44221,"journal":{"name":"Italian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42574233","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Italian StudiesPub Date : 2023-06-08DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2211494
G. Altea
{"title":"Gio Ponti, la collaborazione con le ditte Singer e Altamira e l’immagine postbellica del design italiano negli Stati Uniti","authors":"G. Altea","doi":"10.1080/00751634.2023.2211494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2023.2211494","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44221,"journal":{"name":"Italian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47291591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Italian StudiesPub Date : 2023-05-30DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2201037
Frances Clemente
{"title":"‘And Now the Great Day Had Come, the 14th of May, 1865!’: Anna Vivanti-Lindau e il seicentenario dantesco<sup>*</sup>","authors":"Frances Clemente","doi":"10.1080/00751634.2023.2201037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2023.2201037","url":null,"abstract":"Nel 1865 la letterata tedesca Anna Vivanti-Lindau lascia la sua abitazione londinese per compiere un viaggio nel Mediterraneo assieme al marito Anselmo. Tappa fondamentale del tour è Firenze, dove la letterata, grande estimatrice di Dante, si reca con l’intento di assistere alle celebrazioni del seicentenario dantesco. Nel suo resoconto di viaggio A Journey to Crete, Costantinople, Naples and Florence. Three Months Abroad, Vivanti-Lindau rievoca il soggiorno fiorentino, offrendo un report del festival dantesco. Riflettendo la ricezione ottocentesca politico-risorgimentale di Dante, ella individua nell’autore della Commedia il padre e profeta dell’Unità italiana e, insieme, il simbolo di una libertà che andava oltre i confini del territorio italiano. Il presente contributo propone una lettura analitica delle pagine del Journey dedicate al seicentenario, contestualizzandole nel quadro della fortuna ottocentesca di Dante nel periodo in cui si muove Vivanti-Lindau, con particolare attenzione alla ricezione britannica del poeta negli anni a cavallo dell’unificazione italiana.","PeriodicalId":44221,"journal":{"name":"Italian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135643314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Italian StudiesPub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2221057
E. Baldi
{"title":"Man as Memory and Metaphor of Matter: Italo Calvino’s ‘Priscilla’ and the Narration of (Bio)science","authors":"E. Baldi","doi":"10.1080/00751634.2023.2221057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2023.2221057","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article investigates the relation between science and narration through the lens of gender and anthropocentrism. By analysing Calvino’s long, ‘biocomic’ triptych ‘Priscilla’ (published in T con zero in 1967) alongside (popular) scientific tales on (a)sexual reproduction, patterns in fictional and scientific storytelling are individuated. The three parts of Calvino’s story, starting from a unicellular organism and ending in the (primordial) sea, tell a remarkably non-anthropocentric tale. Different life forms and sexualities are explored alongside the microbiology of human reproduction. The binary terms and gendered hierarchies through which the meeting of egg and sperm is often recounted in scientific narratives are much less pronounced in ‘Priscilla’. By exploring the posthuman and non-speciesist aspects of Calvino’s story, the entanglement between past and future, pre-human and post-human, human and animal, can be reappraised in an original manner.","PeriodicalId":44221,"journal":{"name":"Italian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44653187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Italian StudiesPub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2221056
Michele Maiolani
{"title":"Autobiography as Self-Ethnography in Italo Calvino’s ‘La poubelle agréée’","authors":"Michele Maiolani","doi":"10.1080/00751634.2023.2221056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2023.2221056","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The relevance of Calvino’s anthropological readings, often overlooked by scholars, is particularly evident in his autobiographical project Passaggi obbligati. The structure of the book, consisting of a selection of crucial turning points in the author’s life, is modelled on the theories presented by Arnold Van Gennep in Les Rites de passage. Considering ‘La poubelle agréée’ as a case study, I will highlight Calvino’s shaping of his autobiography according to Van Gennep’s ritual frame, which can be described as a hybrid form of autobiography and ethnography, and which I define as ‘self-ethnography’. The influence of Mary Douglas’ reflection on impurity and garbage in her book Purity and Danger will then be considered as a further crucial theoretical reference for Calvino’s construction of his self-ethnographic narrative.","PeriodicalId":44221,"journal":{"name":"Italian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45968454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Italian StudiesPub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2200272
Charlotte Ross
{"title":"In Memoriam: Professor Michael Caesar (1945–2022)","authors":"Charlotte Ross","doi":"10.1080/00751634.2023.2200272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2023.2200272","url":null,"abstract":"Michael Caesar, Emeritus Serena Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK), or Mike (as he was to many of us), left a lasting impact on many academic colleagues who came to know him over his long career in Italian Studies. Having graduated in Modern Languages from Trinity Hall, Cambridge he took up a position at the University of Kent soon after. In 1994 he was appointed as Chair of Italian Studies at the University of Birmingham, where he remained until his retirement in 2014. He was a regular presence at Society for Italian Studies conferences, and contributed greatly to Italian Studies research through his impressively wide-ranging work: this includes his monograph on Umberto Eco: Philosophy, Semiotics, and the Work of Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 1999); the coauthored book, with Ann Hallamore Caesar, Modern Italian Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); edited collections, such as Dante. The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge, 1996); Orality and Literacy in Modern Italian Culture, co-edited with Marina Spunta (New York: Routledge, 2006); many articles interrogating theoretical reflections by Gaetano Della Volpe, Eco, the neo-avantgarde, Franco Moretti; and analyses of key modern Italian authors, including Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, and Gianni Celati. Mike’s publications helped to open up the field of Italian Studies in crucial ways, paying serious scholarly attention to topics and authors that had not previously been explored, grappling with complex theoretical ideas and making connections across genres, periods, and themes. His most significant contribution is perhaps his work on Giacomo Leopardi: Mike established the Leopardi Centre at Birmingham in 1998, which led to a swathe of exciting Ph.D. projects and important publications that were transformative for Leopardi Studies. Together with Franco D’Intino he also edited the first complete critical English edition of Leopardi’s notebooks, the Zibaldone, with translations by Kathleen Baldwin, Richard Dixon, David Gibbons, Ann Goldstein, Gerry Slowey, Martin Thom and Pamela Williams (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). In what follows, several colleagues remember Mike’s good humour, passion for Italian culture, and his impact on themselves and on the field of Italian Studies. These memories confirm how transformative our relationships with academic colleagues can be, to ourselves, and for future generations of scholars. They reveal the many and variegated activities that make up an academic career: individual and collaborative research projects; teaching; mentoring; developing departments, programmes, and the discipline itself; opening up broader debate. Moreover, these recollections reveal how seemingly small moments can remain with us with startling clarity, and the importance of being listened to with kindness as well as with exactitude. Mike was a great (and exacting) listener, as well as a dynamic presence in Italian Studies, and he ","PeriodicalId":44221,"journal":{"name":"Italian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43018914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Italian StudiesPub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2221058
D. Savio
{"title":"Perdere le radici. Appunti sulla modernità di Italo Calvino","authors":"D. Savio","doi":"10.1080/00751634.2023.2221058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2023.2221058","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT L’articolo intende sviluppare alcune considerazioni sul rapporto tra il mito identitario delle radici e l’opera di Italo Calvino, nel contesto della modernità letteraria e in particolare del ventesimo secolo. L’analisi si concentrerà su testi come ‘La speculazione edilizia’, ‘La strada di San Giovanni’, ‘Dall’opaco’ e ‘Il museo dei formaggi’. Cercherò di mettere in luce la postura di Calvino in relazione al territorio ligure da cui proviene, e più in generale proverò a dimostrare come l’autore sia immune a qualsiasi nostalgia consolatoria o regressiva. L’idea di fondo è che Calvino non trasformi il passato in un mito di appartenenza etnico-geografica: il suo metodo archeologico cerca invece di processare la ‘diversità contemporanea delle culture umane’ (Marc Augé), prendendo atto di come la modernità abbia cancellato ogni illusione di permanenza e di stabilità antropologica.","PeriodicalId":44221,"journal":{"name":"Italian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45812234","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Italian StudiesPub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2220539
Marzia Beltrami
{"title":"Italo Calvino’s Spatial Imagination: Between Intellectual Abstraction and Embodied Experience","authors":"Marzia Beltrami","doi":"10.1080/00751634.2023.2220539","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2023.2220539","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article reassesses the view of Calvino as an eminently cerebral author by recognising the experiential and embodied dimension of his work and dismantling the false dichotomy between abstraction and bodily experience. I describe Calvino’s imagination as spatial (a) because it is grounded in an embodied experience of space, and (b) because he tends to manipulate the material of imagination – ideas, structures, images – as if they were spaces with which narrators and characters interact. Focusing on ‘Dall’opaco’ (1971), I show how the Ligurian landscape impacted Calvino’s cognitive style by inspiring some privileged patterns in making sense of experience. Then, I illustrate how image schemas derived by embodied experience shape narrative structures and strategies of readerly engagement in the cosmicomical tales. My hypothesis is that the lens of enactivism – which understands imagination as manipulation and holds subject-cogniser and the world as entangled and co-constitutive – may highlight some neglected aspects of Calvino’s work.","PeriodicalId":44221,"journal":{"name":"Italian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47278319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}