Prue Shaw is one of the world's foremost authorities on Dante. Written with the general reader in mind, Reading Dante brings her knowledge to bear in an accessible yet expert introduction to his great poem.

This is far more than an exegesis of Dante's three-part Commedia. Shaw communicates the imaginative power, the linguistic skill and the emotional intensity of Dante's poetry--the qualities that make the Commedia perhaps the greatest literary work of all time and not simply a medieval treatise on morality and religion.

The book provides a graphic account of the complicated geography of Dante's version of the afterlife and a sure guide to thirteenth-century Florence and the people and places that influenced him. At the same time it offers a literary experience that lifts the reader into the universal realms of poetry and mythology, creating links not only to the classical world of Virgil and Ovid but also to modern art and poetry, the world of T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney and many others.

Dante's questions are our questions: What is it to be a human being? How should we judge human behavior? What matters in life and in death? Reading Dante helps the reader to understand Dante's answers to these timeless questions and to see how surprisingly close they sometimes are to modern answers.

Reading Dante is an astonishingly lyrical work that will appeal to both those who've never read the Commedia and those who have. It underscores Dante's belief that poetry can change human lives.

A towering figure in world literature, Dante wrote his great epic poem Commedia in the early fourteenth century. The work gained universal acclaim and came to be known as La Divina Commedia, or The Divine Comedy. Giuseppe Mazzotta brings Dante and his masterpiece to life in this exploration of the man, his cultural milieu, and his endlessly fascinating works. Based on Mazzotta's highly popular Yale course, this book offers a critical reading of The Divine Comedy and selected other works by Dante. Through an analysis of Dante's autobiographical Vita nuova, Mazzotta establishes the poetic and political circumstances of The Divine Comedy. He situates the three sections of the poem--Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise--within the intellectual and social context of the late Middle Ages, and he explores the political, philosophical, and theological topics with which Dante was particularly concerned.

Wonderful... Calvino's prose is sparkling as ever, and he approaches ideas with wit and an open mind, always ready to challenge a stale point of view. This anthology will delight Calvino fans old and new. --Publishers Weekly

A rich collection of essays offering an extraordinary global view of Calvino's approach to writing, reading, and interpreting literature.

An extraordinary collection of essays, forewords, articles, and interviews, The Written World and the Unwritten World displays the remarkable intelligence and razor-sharp wit of prolific Italian writer Italo Calvino as he explores the meaning of literature in a rapidly changing world. From classics to contemporary literature, from tradition to the avant-garde, Calvino masterfully explores reading, writing, and translating through careful and illuminating discussion of the works of Bakhtin, Brecht, Cortázar, Thomas Mann, Octavio Paz, Georges Perec, Salman Rushdie, Gore Vidal, and more. Drawn from Mondo scritto e mondo non scritto (2002), Sulla fiaba (1988), and other uncollected essays, this volume of previously untranslated work--now rendered in English by acclaimed translator Ann Goldstein--is a major statement in literary criticism.

Underscores the writer s profound erudition, lively wit, and passion for ideas of all shapes and sizes . . . Eco s pleasure in such explorations is obvious and contagious. Booklist

An investigation of the effects of the Reconstruction period on Italian writers' literary tellings of the social and economic metamorphosis of Italy.

In the aftermath of the Reconstruction era, immediately after the Second World War, Italy experienced an unprecedented phase of economic development, which transformed it from a traditionally agricultural and impoverished country into one of Europe's most industrialized nations. The idea, treasured to this day by many Italians, that this period represents a golden age has been increasingly called into question by historical research that has unveiled the evident contradictions of Italian society at the time.

Mapping Post-War Italian Literature examines the boom years and their legacy to explore the long-lasting impact of post-war Italy's urbanization and modernization on the imagination of Italian writers. Brecciaroli looks at how transformations affecting Italy's leading industrial cities of the North, specifically Milan and Turin, as well as the provinces have been conceptualized in contemporary novels and travel accounts. The selected texts cross genre boundaries and reflect an array of literary perspectives, giving a compelling and multifaceted account of the post-war historical transition.

Through an historical and philological lens, this book explores passages from Dante's Commedia which reveal elements inspired byprocessions, pageants, liturgical drama, psalm singing, or dance performance. The sacred poem finds influence in medieval theories of the performing arts as well as actual performances which Dante would have seen in churches or town squares. Dante's Performance opens a new perspective from which to consider the Commedia: Dante expected his contemporary readers to recognize references to and echoes of psalms, sacred plays, and performative practices. Twenty-first-century readers are tasked with reconstructing a cultural framework which allows us to grasp those same textual references.

From the dramatization of the harrowing of hell in Inferno IX, to Beatrice's celebratory return on top of Mount Purgatory, to the songs of the blessed, this study connects Dante's language to coeval theoretical and practical texts about performance.

If hell is the Middle Age's theatrum diaboli, purgatory stages a performed purification through songs and acting, while paradise offers the spectacle of blessed spirits within the heavenly spheres as an aid to human understanding (Par. IV 28-39).

Food and Emotions in Italian Women's Writing discusses the relevance of food imagery in the writing of Italian women over a period of one hundred years, from the 1920s to the present day, while offering new ways to narrate women's history and creativity. In this groundbreaking work, Patrizia Sambuco shows how food imagery in different historical periods challenge established political discourses by conveying unexpressed, alternative, or transgressive emotions.

Through literary analysis, archival research, and philosophical approaches to the senses, emotions, and food, the book considers a variety of authors, from the celebrated to the hardly known. Sambuco argues that in different ways, throughout the decades, the conceptual domain of food has helped express forms of selfhood that push the boundaries of womanhood and interact with cultural and political panoramas at national and international levels. Building an alternative history of Italian women and their creativity, Sambuco shows how the interplay of the senses and emotions becomes a profitable way to illuminate overlooked aspects of women's subjectivity. Food and Emotions in Italian Women's Writing ultimately reassesses women's writing, giving value to the marginality of women's bodies and positions through the conceptual domain of food.

The Gothic, proliferating across different literary, socio-cultural, and scientific spaces, permeated and influenced the project of Italian nation-building, casting a dark and pervasive shadow on Italian history. Gothic Italy explores the nuances, contradictions, and implications of the conflict between what the Gothic embodies in post-unification Italy and the values that a supposedly secular, modern country tries to uphold and promote.

The book analyses a variety of literary works concerned with crime that tapped into fears relating to contagion, race, and class fluidity; deviant minds and abnormal sexuality; female transgression; male performativity; and the instability of the new body politic. By tracing how writers, scientists, and thinkers engaged with these issues, Gothic Italy unveils the mutual network of exchanges that informed national discourses about crime. Stefano Serafini brings attention to a historical moment that was crucial to the development of modern attitudes towards normality and deviance, which continue to circulate widely and still resonate disturbingly in contemporary society.

The theatrical tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803), Italy's greatest dramatist of the late 1700s, feature themes and elegant verse that perfectly reflect his neoclassical age. Life presents Alfieri's autobiography, detailing a journey that was anything but measured and orderly, giving the modern reader an entertaining and insightful view of privileged life and travel in pre-Napoleonic Europe and the gradual (and late) development of a cultured, literary mind. Alfieri leads us through childhood humiliations in Torino, introductions to popes and sovereigns, love affairs scandalous and noble, Baltic ice storms, treks across Spain, a late-night duel in London, a narrow escape from revolutionary Paris, venereal inconveniences, and the difficulty of breaking into the literary establishment. A stubborn and proud man, Alfieri includes in his memoirs enough self-awareness and self-deprecation to make his character engaging and often sympathetic.

This new translation, the first in seventy years, includes footnotes describing places, people, and events largely unfamiliar to twenty-first-century readers plus Alfieri's own appendices - letters, poems, early drafts of scenes - translated into English for the first time.

Italo Calvino (1923-85) travelled to Japan in the autumn of 1976. Thereafter, his work shows an increasing fascination with Japanese literature and Zen Buddhism, even as he adds Japanese works to the bookshelves of his library in Rome. This is the first study to restore to the author's writing the dynamics of East-West dialogues, addressing Japanese gardens and temples, but also literary and artistic expressions, as the spaces through which Calvino developed a landmark feature of his distinctive cultural ecology: a renewed awareness of the interdependency between human and other-than-human forms of life and communication.

Claudia Dellacasa is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Glasgow.

Never afraid to think for himself, Pico judged Petrarch's poetry as something to entice in the first instance, but does not satisfy further. Yet, he did not stop there. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was a man who rattled his contemporary Great Chain of Beiing. A man withiut limits. Brilliant, a prodigious memory able to recite Dante;s Commedia backwards. A master of languages, with Latin, ancient Greek and Hebrew in his wheelhouse. With his 900 Theses he openly questioned Catholic theology and saw value in other world religions. He shared literary letters with Lorenzo de' Medici. One of the products of which were his 45 sonnets-original, penetrating and engaging.

An easy way for both novice and scholar to explore Pico's language and sonnets, his analysis of Dante and Petrarch, and his defense of the vernacular.

What you will find in Echoes of Growing up Italian are accounts of the immigrant experience as told through the eyes of women. The Italian diaspora is one of the most significant of the 20th century, with a far-reaching impact in the Americas, Australia and Northern Europe. The Italian immigration narrative is a universal one. The stories in this book of the Italian woman in North America and how she learned to survive as she lived with two cultures in her heart and home. This collection provides the reader with a candid glimpse into the lives of fifteen women from across North America: some were born and raised in Italy while some have only been there on holidays; some are mothers and grandmothers and some are single; some only know a few words of Italian, while others are fluent, but we all have a discerning perspective on what it means to live with two cultures.

A richly illustrated analysis from one of Europe's greatest living philosophers.

In Pinocchio, Giorgio Agamben turns his keen philosopher's eye to the famous nineteenth-century novel by Carlo Collodi. To Agamben, Pinocchio's adventures are a kind of initiation into life itself. Like us, the mischievous puppet is caught between two worlds. He is faced with the alternatives of submitting to authority or of carrying on, stubbornly indulging his way of being. From Agamben's virtuoso interpretation of this classic story, we learn that we can harbor the mystery of existence only if we are not aware of it, only if we manage to cohabit with an area of non-knowledge, immemorial and very near. Richly illustrated with images from three early editions of Collodi's novel, this new volume will delight enthusiasts of both literature and philosophy.

In If This Is a Man, Italian Jewish writer Primo Levi wrote an ethical treatise on how to regain humanity after atrocity. His need to write developed at Auschwitz. Upon return to Italy in late 1945, he began to compose his first testimonial work. In After Poland, a story written as both a biography and a memoir, scholar Cheryl Chaffin travels to Poland because of her love for Levi's writing and his story. As a student in Italy in the 1980s, Chaffin first discovered Levi's work. Years later, his words accompany her through sites of memory and modern streets of rebuilt cities and towns. Chaffin turns to Polish art, poetry, photography, and politics to make sense of interconnected histories. This is a literary love story of one's woman's confrontation with the trauma of history. In deep engagement with Levi's writing, she discovers her own ethical response to the world and learns how to live in response to the histories that haunt us.

Central to Grazia Deledda's narrative worlds are the relationships between her characters and the vast landscapes in which they move and act. The writer translates and represents her characters, her characters' emotions, and her natural and urban landscapes with a vocabulary that is often related to the visual arts. However, although her descriptions contain the gradations of Modernist painting, beginning with Impressionism, no book-length study, and with diverse perspectives, has thus far investigated Deledda's relationship with the visual arts and the resulting painterly aesthetic of her multicolored narratives. In this sense, Grazia Deledda's Painterly Aesthetic provides an articulated literary panorama of Deledda's novels and short stories through a discourse that is situated between literature and pictorial art. Inspired by these two cardinal points, the analyses are undertaken by contributors who have a profound awareness of an epochal change and work in different disciplines. One year from the centenary of her receipt of the Nobel Prize, the contributors investigate the connections, consonances, and differences between Grazia Deledda's oeuvre and other works inside this panorama to verify a possible unity of purpose. At the same time, they seek to ascertain whether these connections can corroborate and exalt the choices that the Sardinian writer made to free herself from the constraints of a hostile environment.

This volume is the first to examine in parallel the ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first century Anglo-American Dante scholarship and Italian dantistica have studied key issues at the centre of the poet's oeuvre. It offers a critically and contextually informed overview that concentrates on the main trends, features, and specificities of both traditions, as well as their points of contact. Leading scholars discuss the history and development of the principal questions that characterize the present-day study of Dante and his writings - questions related to Dante's biography, his religious and political beliefs, his literary and doctrinal readings and knowledge, and the position of his writings in modern critical developments.

The ugly woman is a surprisingly common figure in Italian poetry, one that has been frequently appropriated by male poetic imagination to depict moral, aesthetic, social, and racial boundaries. Mostly used between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries - from the invectives of Rustico Filippi, Franco Sacchetti, and Burchiello, to the paradoxical praises of Francesco Berni, Niccolò Campani and Pietro Aretino, and further to the conceited encomia of Giambattista Marino and Marinisti - the portrayal of female unattractiveness was, argues Patrizia Bettella in The Ugly Woman, one way of figuring woman as 'other.'

Bettella shows how medieval female ugliness included transgressive types ranging from the lustful old hag, to the slanderer, the wild woman, the heretic/witch, and the prostitute, whereas Early Modern unattractiveness targeted peasants, mountain dwellers, and black slaves: marginal women whose bodies and manners subvert aesthetic precepts of culturally normative beauty and propriety. Taking a philological and feminist approach, and drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of the grotesque body and on the poetics of transgression, The Ugly Woman is a unique look at the essential counterdiscourse of the celebrated Italian poetic canon and a valuable contribution to the study of women in literature.

Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the three crowns of Italian literature, dealt with literature, doctrine, and reality in distinct, yet also overlapping, ways. In this major collection of nineteen essays, Barański explores how they endeavoured to create and establish their authority and identity as writers, while developing new ideas about literature and its status in the world, and, especially in Dante's case, forging and legitimating new forms of writing. Each treated other authors, such as Guido Cavalcanti, or intellectuals, such as Epicurus, polemically and selectively as foils to their own self-portraits. Petrarch and Boccaccio had also to contend with Dante, and his extraordinary success as a 'modern' vernacular authority, though they employed very different strategies for doing so. Barański's close attention to the medieval context uniting these greatest of medieval writers is complemented by an equally close attention to the scholarly tradition on the questions addressed. To be a historian of literature also means being a historian of one's subject.

Zygmunt G. Barański is Serena Professor of Italian Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and Notre Dame Professor of Dante & Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has published extensively on Dante, on medieval Italian literature, on Dante's fourteenth- and twentieth-century reception, and on twentieth-century Italian literature, film, and culture. For many years he was senior editor of The Italianist, and currently holds the same position with Le tre corone.

This book argues that political concerns, inseparable from Dante's biography, permeate his entire corpus, emerging at the intersection of the multiple fields of knowledge he explores, from the liberal arts to law, philosophy, and theology. It also shows that Dante, by elucidating the natural integration of the humanities with the sciences, continues to be a source of provocative insights and inspirations on how to be political beings today.

Preceded by an introductory chapter focused on politics and education, the essays collected in the volume offer a range of close textual and contextual readings of Dante's life and works grouped in four parts: 1. The Self and History, 2. Visions of the World: Cosmology and Utopia, 3. From the Language of Politics to the Language of Theology, 4. Instances of Political Reception in Asia and South America. The different disciplinary angles adopted by the contributors include history, economics, jurisprudence, linguistics, ethics, metaphysics, theology, cosmology, social thought, ecology, education, and the performing and visual arts.

The collection addresses a specialized audience of Dante scholars, medievalists, historians, political philosophers and scientists, reception scholars, and legal and cultural historians.

Winner of the 2014 PEN USA Literary Award for Translation

This Norton Critical Edition includes:
- Fifty-five judiciously chosen stories from Wayne A. Rebhorn's translation of The Decameron.
- Introductory materials and explanatory footnotes by Wayne A. Rebhorn, along with three maps.
- Biographical works by Filippo Villani and Ludovico Dolce along with literary studies by Francesco Petrarca, Andreas Capellanus, and Boccaccio.
- Eleven critical essays, including those by Giuseppe Mazzotta, Millicent Marcus, Teodolinda Barolini, Susanne L. Wofford, Luciano Rossi, and Richard Kuhns.
- A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography.