Combines theme and genre analysis in a study of the Italian author, from her first literary writings in the 1930s to her novels in the 1990s.

This book examines the vre of Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998) from her first literary writings in the Thirties to her great novels in the Nineties. The analysis focusses on two interweaving core themes, loss and the Other. It begins with the shaping of personal loss of an Other following death, separation, abandonment, coupled with melancholy for life's transience as depicted in autobiographical works and in her masterpiece Il porto di Toledo. The book then addresses Ortese's literary engagement with social themes in realist stories set in post-war Naples in her collection Il mare non bagna Napoli and then explores her continuing preoccupation with socio-ethical issues, imbued with autobiographical elements, in non-realist texts, including her masterful novels L'Iguana, Il cardillo addolorato and Alonso e i visionari The book combines theme and genre analysis, highlighting Ortese's adoption and hybridization of diverse literary forms such as poetry, the novel, the short story, the essay, autobiography, realism, fairy tales, fantasy, allegory. In her work Ortese weaves an ongoing dialogue with literary and non-literary works, through direct quotations, allusions, echoes, adoption of motifs and topoi. The book thus highlights the intertextual relationship with her sources: Leopardi, Dante, Petrarch, Manzoni, Collodi, Montale, Serao; Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Blake, Joyce, Conrad, Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Hardy; Manrique, Gongora, de Quevedo, Villalón, Bello, Cantar del mio Cid; Heine, Valery, Puccini's Madam Butterfly, folklore, popular songs, and the Bible. Ortese thus shapes her literary themes in the background of social, political and economic upheavals over six decades of Italian history, culminating in an allegorical critique of modernity and a call for a renewed bond between humans and the Other.

This text explores the literary work of Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998), one of the greatest and most original writers in 20th-century Italian and European literature and shows the intense relationship between Ortese's texts and masterpieces of European literature.

Anna Maria Ortese: Celestial Geographies features a selection of essays by established Ortese scholars that trace her remarkable creative trajectory.

This edited volume is the first to propose new readings of Italian and transnational female-authored texts through the lens of Trauma Studies. Illuminating a space that has so far been left in the shadows, Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women’s Writing provides new insights into how the trope of trauma shapes the narrative, temporal and linguistic dimension of these works. The various contributions delineate a landscape of female-authored Italian and transnational trauma narratives and their complex textual negotiation of suffering and pathos, from the twentieth century to the present day. These zones of trauma engender a new aesthetics and a new reading of history and cultural memory as an articulation of female creativity and resistance against a dominant cultural and social order.

Investigating the interrelationships between orality and writing in elite and popular textual culture in early modern Italy, this volume shows how the spoken or sung word on the one hand, and manuscript or print on the other hand, could have interdependent or complementary roles to play in the creation and circulation of texts. The first part of the book centres on performances, ranging from realizations of written texts to improvisations or semi-improvisations that might draw on written sources and might later be committed to paper. Case studies examine the poems sung in the piazza that narrated contemporary warfare, commedia dell'arte scenarios, and the performative representation of the diverse spoken languages of Italy. The second group of essays studies the influence of speech on the written word and reveals that, as fourteenth-century Tuscan became accepted as a literary standard, contemporary non-standard spoken languages were seen to possess an immediacy that made them an effective resource within certain kinds of written communication. The third part considers the roles of orality in the worlds of the learned and of learning. The book as a whole demonstrates that the borderline between orality and writing was highly permeable and that the culture of the period, with its continued reliance on orality alongside writing, was often hybrid in nature.

What is Italian pop culture? This volume provides an answer to this question, offering an insight into some of the most recent and interesting developments in the field of pop culture. The reader will find essays on a variety of topics including literature, theater, music, social media, comics, politics, and even Christmas. Each contribution here places stress on the popular. The main reference points guiding the chapters are, in fact, the pioneering works by Antonio Gramsci and Umberto Eco. The result is, therefore, a portrait of a country where mass participation in cultural events always accompanies some form of reflection on the national identity and other related issues. Historians and sociologists, as well as musicologists and philosophers (in addition to pop culture aficionados), will find the text an engaging and indispensable read.

This book is addressed to “lovers of paradoxes” and we have done our utmost to assemble a stellar cast of Neapolitan and American scholars, intellectuals, and artists/writers who are strong and open-minded enough to wrestle with and illuminate the paradoxes through which Naples presents itself. Naples is a mysterious metropolis. Difficult to understand, it is an enigma to outsiders, and also to the Neapolitans themselves. Its very impenetrableness is what makes it so deliriously and irresistibly attractive. The essays attempt to give some hints to the answer of the enigma, without parsing it into neat scholastic formulas. In doing this, the book will be an important means of opening Naples to students, scholars and members of the community at large who are engaged in “identity-work.” A primary goal has been to establish a dialogue with leading Neapolitan intellectuals and artists, and, ultimately, ensure that the “deliriously Neapolitan” dance continues.

"Since the early 1980s, the novel has been deemed by many Italian women writers to be the most apt vehicle for creating positive images of the future of women. The novel becomes the space for confession, while at the same time allowing greater expressive freedom. There is no longer one voice for the ""feminine role"" and, by creating heroines who are also intellectuals, these authors offer their readers models of alternative versions of self. This study is a partial inventory of the new women's narrative and aims to provide a broad literary framework through which both the general reader and the student can appreciate the characteristics and innovations of contemporary Italian women's fiction. The writers chosen for this study (Ginerva Bompiani, Edith Bruck, Paola Capriolo, Francesca Duranti, Rosetta Loy, Giuliana Morandini, Marta Morazzoni, Anna Maria Ortese, Sandra Petrignanni, Fabrizia Ramondino, Elisabetta Rasy and Francesca Sanvitale) have achieved both critical acclaim and public recognition and their texts show the richness of voices, topics and structures in Italian women's writing today."

The Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies is a two-volume reference book containing some 600 entries on all aspects of Italian literary culture. It includes analytical essays on authors and works, from the most important figures of Italian literature to little known authors and works that are influential to the field. The Encyclopedia is distinguished by substantial articles on critics, themes, genres, schools, historical surveys, and other topics related to the overall subject of Italian literary studies. The Encyclopedia also includes writers and subjects of contemporary interest, such as those relating to journalism, film, media, children's literature, food and vernacular literatures. Entries consist of an essay on the topic and a bibliographic portion listing works for further reading, and, in the case of entries on individuals, a brief biographical paragraph and list of works by the person. It will be useful to people without specialized knowledge of Italian literature as well as to scholars.