Antonio Gramsci lived the Great War as a “historic break,” a profound experience that left an indelible mark on the development of his political thought. Translated into English for the first time, Alternative Modernities reconstructs and analyses this critical period of Gramsci’s intellectual formation through a systematic analysis of his writings from 1915 to 1935. For Gramsci, Soviet Communism, “Americanism,” and the “new” Fascist State were the principle responses to the crisi...

This anthology brings together key articles translated into English for the first time from Italian debates concerning Antonio Gramsci's writings on language and translation as central to his entire social and political thought. It includes recent scholarship by Italian, German and English-speaking scholars providing important contributions to debates concerning culture, language, Marxism, post-Marxism, and identity as well as the many fields in which Gramsci's notion of hegemony has been ...

The opening lines of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri launched Rod Dreher on a journey that rescued him from exile and saved his life. Dreher found that the medieval poem offered him a surprisingly practical way of solving modern problems.Following the death of his little sister and the publication of his New York Times bestselling memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Dreher found himself living in the small community of Starhill, ...

Giovannino Guareschi (1908-1968) was an Italian journalist, humorist, and cartoonist best known for his short stories based on the fictional Catholic priest Don Camillo. In this study, Alan R. Perry explores the Don Camillo stories from the perspective of Christian hermeneutics, a unique approach and the best critical key to unlocking the richness of both the author and his tales.The stories of Don Camillo, the cantankerous but beloved priest, and his sidekick, Communist mayor Pepp...

The original essays gathered in this book make a beginning at exploring the cultural significance of The Name of the Rose in terms of its backgrounds and literary contexts. Eco's novel is examined in the light of several of the traditions from which it draws: theories of detective fiction, comedy, postmodernism, the apocalypse, semiotics, and literary criticism. The authors from a variety of language disciplines frequently draw on Eco's own scholarly commentaries to elucidate the ...

Unlock the more straightforward side of The Leopard with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!This engaging summary presents an analysis of The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa, which tells the story of the Salina family and their changing place in Sicilian society. The novel presents a sharply critical view of 19th century Sicilian society and, with the help of historical events and figures, charts the fall of the aristocracy a...

The book collects scholarly essays in the fields of English and French maritime terminology and sea literature. It focuses on the linguistic, literary and cultural exploration of the sea, considering new directions for research in the vast domain of «thalassology». Structured into two sections, which reflect its two main areas of enquiry (terminological and literary) and cultural standpoints (Anglophone and Francophone), the collection breaks new ground in approaching the study of the sea ...

Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy is a reappraisal of the poem by an international team of thirty-four scholars. Each vertical reading analyses three same-numbered cantos from the three canticles: Inferno i, Purgatorio i and Paradiso i; Inferno ii, Purgatorio ii and Paradiso ii; etc. Although scholars have suggested before that there are correspondences between same-numbered cantos that beg to be explored, this is the first time that the approach has been pursued in a systematic fashion ...

This book bridges the fields of Children’s Literature and Italian Studies by examining how turn-of-the-century children’s books forged a unified national identity for the new Italian State. Through contextualized close readings of a wide range of texts, Truglio shows how the 19th-century concept of recapitulation, which held that ontogeny (the individual’s development) repeats phylogeny (the evolution of the species), underlies the strategies of this corpus. Italian fairy tales, novels, po...

In this book, the author presents that although various Old Romance grammars can be traced back to the common Latin ancestor, the functional domain of reciprocity shows divergent paths of development. In this regard, each of the languages have worked up their unique solutions, with grammatical and semantic mechanisms underlying their diversity.

Thomas Mann’s novel Der Zauberberg (1913–1924) illustrates a change in the author’s conceptions of life, death, disease and Eros following World War I. Set in a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium, the novel’s main protagonist, Hans Castorp, comes into contact with three pedagogic figures who each represent a different attitude towards these themes. The humanist Settembrini, for example, affirms life but is repulsed by Eros, disease and death; the Jesuit ascetic Naphta glorifies erotic ...

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. Though Petrachism is usually read solely as a vernacular poetic tradition, in Writing Beloveds, Feng recovers the initial political purposes in Latin prose and traces how poetry set the terms for gender, agency, and power in early modern Italy.By revealing th...