Modern Italian literature / Ann Hallamore Caesar and Michael Caesar.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Caesar, Ann.

Contributor:

Caesar, Michael.

Series:

Cultural history of literature

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Italian literature--History and criticism.

Italian literature.

Literature, Modern.

Literature and history--Italy.

Literature and history.

Italy.

Physical Description:

ix, 233 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Polity, 2007.

Summary:

This authoritative and vividly written book brings readers into the heart of Italian literary culture from the 1690s to the present. It probes the work of major authors in their broad cultural context, traces the history of audiences and publishers, explores the shifting relationship between public and private, assesses the impact of significant historical trends and events on creative processes, and establishes the continuities as well as the discontinuities of the Italian literary tradition.

A synoptic overview at the beginning of the volume is designed to help the reader get her or his bearings in the detail of the nine chapters which follow. Using an essentially chronological framework, the book is divided into three major cultural time-spans: the 'long' eighteenth century, the decades of national identity formation and the creation of 'modern', industrial Italy between 1816 and 1900, and the twentieth century with its constant renegotiation of national cultural identity. A final epilogue provides a snapshot of Italian literary culture in the near-present. This is a book which will be readily accessible to students and all those interested in Italian culture, and at the same time is based on the most up-to-date scholarship. New readings of the canonical authors rub shoulders with a refreshing attention to 'standard' and popular writing, gender issues, and the interaction between written and oral forms, producing a history of modern Italian literature which is new in its conception and its scope.

Contents:

Introduction: an overview of modern Italian literature 1

Part I The Long Eighteenth Century (1690-1815)

1 Cross-currents of modernity 13

1.1 This is Arcadia 13

1.2 New states, new thinkers 21

2 Enlightenment and the public arena 28

2.1 Journalism, theatre and the book trade in Venice 28

2.2 Enlightenment and reform from Naples to Milan 34

3 Literature and revolution 45

3.1 Italy and France 45

3.2 Alfieri: life and drama 51

3.3 Foscolo: between classicism and romanticism 58

Part II Literature and Unification (1816-1900)

4 Romantic Italy 67

4.1 Milan 1816 67

4.2 Florence 1827 72

4.3 Leopardi: the challenge of poetry 77

5 Writing the nation 87

5.1 Manzoni: the responsibility of the writer 87

5.2 History and fiction 92

5.3 Literature and the people 99

5.4 Memory, monuments and the national past 106

6 Making the nation 113

6.1 The literary culture of Unification 113

6.2 The artist as observer: verismo and the social 119

6.3 Domesticity and the literary market 124

Part III From Modernism to the Market (1900 to the Present)

7 Modernism and the crisis of the literary subject 135

7.1 The search for identity 135

7.2 War, technology and the arts 143

7.3 Narratives of selfhood: the subjective turn in fiction 150

8 Literature, Fascism and anti-Fascism 159

8.1 Writing and the regime 159

8.2 The social condition of intellectuals 165

8.3 Testing the limits of the novel 170

8.4 Resistance, Reconstruction and neo-realism 180

9 From the avant-garde to the market-place 188

9.1 The last avant-garde? 188

9.2 The widening of culture 195

9.3 A minimalist postmodernism: the poetics of attention 202

9.4 Epilogue: a weekend in April 209.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [215]-222) and index.

ISBN:

9780745627991

0745627994

9780745628004

0745628001

OCLC:

166281771