Böcker i Toronto Italian Studies-serien

Covering a period from the late-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth century, Aileen A. Feng's engagingly written work identifies and analyzes a Latin humanist precursor to the poetic movement known as Renaissance Petrarchism.

The Italian Antimafia, New Media, and the Culture of Legality is the first book to examine the online battles between the mafia and its growing cohort of opponents.

The Story-Takers charts new territory in public pedagogy through an exploration of the multiple forms of communal protests against the mafia in Sicily.

In Primo Levi and the Identity of a Survivor, Nancy Harrowitz examines the complex role that Levi's cultural identity played in his choices of how to portray his survival, as well as his exposition of topics such as bystander complicity.

This ground-breaking study of Italian-Canadian writers and artists with roots in Istria and Dalmatia highlights the history of their diaspora, the vitality of their literary and artistic works, and the distinctive multiculturalism that characterises them.

The Art of Objects explores the experimental encounter of arts and industry in Italy at the turn of the 20th century, tracing the origins of the Italian culture of design in the social and aesthetic construction of the age's most iconic industrial objects.

A decisive contribution to the study of Carlo Michelstaedter, Italian writer and philosopher.

Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces explores the performative aspects of early modern theatre architecture and design, explicating the aesthetic function of pictorial displacements, visual anomalies, and architectural paradoxes

This is the first book-length study to address the question of religion in contemporary Italian cinema and television. It questions why religion persists on Italian screens and how this reflects and constructs Italy's emerging post-secularity.

The Dramaturgy of the Spectator describes the development of the modern theatre spectator, the modern playwright, and their complex relationship with sovereignty, power structures, and the emergent public sphere in the seventeenth through the eighteenth century.

The Court and Its Critics focuses on the disillusionment with courtliness, the derision of those who live at court, and the open hostility toward the court, themes common to Renaissance culture.

This book examines the many ways in which anger and indignation shape authorial intentions and determine the products of contemporary Italian artists.

In Tuscan Spaces, Silvia Ross focuses on constructions of Tuscany in twentieth-century Italian literature and juxtaposes them with English prose works by such authors as E.M. Forster and Frances Mayes to expose the complexity of literary representation centred on a single milieu.

Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism provides a unique analysis of the political life of the major Italian philosopher and literary figure Benedetto Croce (1866-1952). Relying on a range of resources rarely used before in Croce studies, Fabio Rizi paints an evocative picture of Croce in the fascist era.

In this work Luca Somigli discusses several European artistic movements - decadentism, Italian futurism, vorticism, and imagism - and argues for the centrality of the works of F.T. Marinetti in the transition from a fin de siécle decadent poetics, exemplified by the manifestoes of Anatole Baju, to a properly avant-garde project.

Through the prism of the rise and fall of Galeazzo Ciano (1903-1944), this biography is a comprehensive study of a leading member of the fascist regime other than Benito Mussolini.

The expert readings in this collection explore the ten stories of Day Six of Boccaccio's Decameron - a day that involves meditations on language, narration, and meaning

Lucamante looks at the ways in which both Italian literary tradition and external influences have assisted Italian women writers in rethinking the theoretical and aesthetic ties between author, text, and readership in the construction of the novel.

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including war diaries, memoirs, paintings, films, and government archives, Roads and Ruins is a richly textured study that offers an original perspective on a well known story.

Ugo Foscolo's Tragic Vision in Italy and England examines an underexplored aspect of Foscolo's literary career: his tragic plays and critical essays on that genre.

Using little-known Italian, Austrian, and Dalmatian sources, Monzali explores the political history of Dalmatia between 1848 and 1915, with a focus on the Italian minority, on Austrian-Italian relations and on the foreign policy of the Italian state towards the region and its peoples.

Including work on psychoanalysis, politics, film production, autobiography, and the relationship between film tradition and contemporary culture, Marco Bellocchio touches on fundamental issues in film analysis.

In The Sopranos: Born under a Bad Sign, Franco Ricci presents an insightful analysis of the groundbreaking HBO series and its complex psychological themes

In Courtesy Lost, Kristina M. Olson analyses the literary impact of the social, political, and economic transformations of the fourteenth century through an exploration of Dante's literary and political influence on Boccaccio.

Measured Words brings together rarely discussed Renaissance thinkers to show both the commonalities within and the variety of the conversations between computation and writing.

Modernist Idealism develops a framework for understanding modernist production as the artistic realization of philosophical concepts elaborated in German idealism.

In classical and early modern rhetoric, to write or speak using the voice of a dead individual is known as eidolopoeia. Whether through ghost stories, journeys to another world, or dream visions, Renaissance writers frequently used this rhetorical device not only to co-opt the authority of their predecessors but in order to express partisan or politically dangerous arguments.In Speaking Spirits, Sherry Roush presents the first systematic study of early modern Italian eidolopoeia. Expanding the study of Renaissance eidolopoeia beyond the well-known cases of the shades in Dante’s Commedia and the spirits of Boccaccio’s De casibus vivorum illustrium, Roush examines many other appearances of famous ghosts – invocations of Boccaccio by Vincenzo Bagli and Jacopo Caviceo, Girolamo Malipiero’s representation of Petrarch in Limbo, and Girolamo Benivieni’s ghostly voice of Pico della Mirandola. Through close readings of these eidolopoetic texts, she illuminates the important role that this rhetoric played in the literary, legal, and political history of Renaissance Italy.

Contemporary Italian Filmmaking is an innovative critique of Italian filmmaking in the aftermath of World War II - as it moves beyond traditional categories such as genre film and auteur cinema. Manuela Gieri demonstrates that Luigi Pirandello's revolutionary concept of humour was integral to the development of a counter-tradition in Italian filmmaking that she defines `humoristic'. She delineates a `Pirandellian genealogy' in Italian cinema, literature, and culture through her examination of the works of Federico Fellini, Ettore Scola, and many directors of the `new generation,' such as Nanni Moretti, Gabriele Salvatores, Maurizio Nichetti, and Giuseppe Tornatore.A celebrated figure of the theatrical world, Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is little known beyond Italy for his critical and theoretical writings on cinema and for his screenplays. Gieri brings to her reading of Pirandello's work the critical parameters offered by psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and postmodernism to develop a syncretic and transcultural vision of the history of Italian cinema. She identifies two fundamental trends of development in this tradition: the `melodramatic imagination' and the `humoristic,' or comic, imagination. With her focus on the humoristic imagination, Gieri describes a `Pirandellian mode' derived from his revolutionary utterances on the cinema and narrative, and specifically, from his essay on humour, L'umorismo (On Humour, 1908). She traces a history of the Pirandellian mode in cinema and investigates its characteristics, demonstrating the original nature of Italian filmmaking that is particularly indebted to Pirandello's interpretation of humour.

One of the most famous and prestigious of Renaissance schools, Italy's University of Padua attracted a notable body of students from England, including such well-known alumni as Thomas Linacre, Thomas Starkey, and William Harvey. In this work Jonathan Woolfson looks at the reasons why so many Englishmen went to Padua, what they did there, and most importantly, the various ways in which their studies had an impact on Tudor life and thought.Covering a formidable range of intellectual history, Woolfson explores the complex processes of cultural transmission between Italy and England in the areas of humanism, law, political thought, medicine, and natural philosophy. An impressive feature of the book is its biographical register of English visitors to Padua, which comprises 349 separate entries drawn from extensive archival research in Italy and England. From the collective biography that results, as well as from textual studies, Woolfson argues that Padua influenced England in ways that were profound and enduring, but also extremely diverse and sometimes surprising.

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, Niccolo 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.