Modern Italian Literature

by Hallamore Caesar, Ann; Caesar, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780745628004
• ISBN10: 0745628001
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-09-11
• Publisher: Polity

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.

Author Biography

Ann Hallamore Caesar is Professor of Italian at the University of Warwick.


Michael Caesar is Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Birmingham.

Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgements	p. vii
Introduction: an overview of modern Italian literature	p. 1
The Long Eighteenth Century (1690-1815)
Cross-currents of modernity	p. 13
This is Arcadia	p. 13
New states, new thinkers	p. 21
Enlightenment and the public arena	p. 28
Journalism, theatre and the book trade in Venice	p. 28
Enlightenment and reform from Naples to Milan	p. 34
Literature and revolution	p. 45
Italy and France	p. 45
Alfieri: life and drama	p. 51
Foscolo: between classicism and romanticism	p. 58
Literature and Unification (1816-1900)
Romantic Italy	p. 67
Milan 1816	p. 67
Florence 1827	p. 72
Leopardi: the challenge of poetry	p. 77
Writing the nation	p. 87
Manzoni: the responsibility of the writer	p. 87
History and fiction	p. 92
Literature and the people	p. 99
Memory, monuments and the national past	p. 106
Making the nation	p. 113
The literary culture of Unification	p. 113
The artist as observer: verismo and the social	p. 119
Domesticity and the literary market	p. 124
From Modernism to the Market (1900 to the Present)
Modernism and the crisis of the literary subject	p. 135
The search for identity	p. 135
War, technology and the arts	p. 143
Narratives of selfhood: the subjective turn in fiction	p. 150
Literature, Fascism and anti-Fascism	p. 159
Writing and the regime	p. 159
The social condition of intellectuals	p. 165
Testing the limits of the novel	p. 170
Resistance, Reconstruction and neo-realism	p. 180
From the avant-garde to the market-place	p. 188
The last avant-garde?	p. 188
The widening of culture	p. 195
A minimalist postmodernism: the poetics of attention	p. 202
Epilogue: a weekend in April	p. 209
References	p. 215
Further reading	p. 220
Index	p. 223
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