Dalla penna di Alberto Castelli - tra i maggiori conoscitori della black music in Italia - un viaggio nel tempo attraverso città come Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Memphis, Detroit, Londra, Kingston per celebrare, con il ritmo di un programma radiofonico, stili, artisti, canzoni e album diventati classici della musica 'african american'. Un racconto appassionato e corale nel cuore della black music contemporanea, dal jazz al blues, dal gospel al rhythm'n'blues, dal soul classico degli a...

The Ecstasy of Reproduction strives to describe contemporaneity. The subject is the first quarter of the 21st century which the author sees as a condition of historical crisis. Therefore, he analyzes its moral, sociological, and aesthetic expression. We do not need another book on postmodernity, but we need to know where we are along the postmodern turn. Because, of course, we are still in it. We are at least a century away from its ending. “The claim that postmodernism has not en...

This volume offers a philosophical and literary exploration of Dostoevsky’s humanism, with a particular focus on his ethical and aesthetic reflections on human nature. Rather than approaching Dostoevsky through the lens of national character or the so-called Russian spirit, this book engages in a sustained dialogue with his work to illuminate the moral and psychological complexities of the human soul. Emphasizing the intimate and often unsettling terrain of interior life, the author conten...

Romance in the Time of Modernism: A Literature of Silence reasserts the theme of love in an age of anguish. Modernism has been and still is studied and interpreted under multiple perspectives. However, there is a lacuna in the corpus of scholarship: the theme of love has been ignored. Being modernism iconoclastic and obscure in its premises, but also dark in its conclusion, how do modernist characters love? This book emphasizes the persistence of romance in an age of dissolution. ...

This groundbreaking volume challenges conventional scholarship by illuminating a critical blind spot in modernist studies: the persistent yet transformed presence of love. While academia has exhaustively examined modernism through lenses of nihilism, disillusionment, and existential silence, the romantic impulse threading through these seemingly barren landscapes remains largely unexamined. How do characters love within the fractured architecture of modernist narratives? What becomes of ro...

This book examines the relationship between literature and philosophy. It investigates seemingly incomprehensible behaviors from the perspective of philosophy and expounds on love by using, among others, Darwinism, Marxism, Existentialism, Plato, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Barthes as tools of investigation. The author deconstructs some 20 literary texts and presents a work of literary criticism in which literary theories are blended with philosophical theories on the self.A signif...

The Self on Trial is an inquiry into the self and its pathological behaviors. The author observes 20th-century fiction and studies it through a psychological reading. It is evident that the century has produced self-destructive characters whose behaviors and choices are an ultimate form of consummation – primitive, elementary, and inexplicable. Why cannot Prufrock ask the overwhelming question? What is the reason for Humbert’s sexual attraction to Lolita? Why do we destroy what we...

This book is moved by two main questions. Is Love a matter of beauty or mortality? In other words, is love an ethical ideal? Also, modernity understood as the age of mechanical reproduction, has shaped not simply our cities but our very same way of feeling. How has our conception of love changed, if it has, in the past two centuries?This book is to address these questions. It is not to trace the evolution of the idea of love in Western culture, from Plato to the present day. It aim...

This book studies the various narrative shades of love in twentieth-century Latin American fiction. It examines writings by Isabel Allende, Roberto Arlt, García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. The author provides a close textual reading of each novel and discusses how humans make sense of their lives through love. He shifts the focus of these writings from political violence and historical disillusionment to the illusion of love.An important contribution to Latin American literary...

This book aims at explaining romantic love between straight adults through literary texts of the western canon from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Each chapter comes with a multidisciplinary approach in which protagonists are mutilated in their quest for loving as alternative to annihilation.The book emphasizes love as an obsession, thus as an exploration of the mind. From the passion-myth of Tristan and Isolde to the nihilist modernist representations, the western world has...

This edited collection brings together a range of essays that examine the maze of Chinese postmodernity. The essays explore the global expansion of capital as a structural crisis represented in art and literature. It ultimately acknowledges the ambiguity of Chinese postmodernity, the overlapping cultural paradigms of Confucian ethics and a capitalist economy, residual of Maoism, socialist relations, and individualist philosophy.

This book charts ideas European intellectuals (mostly from Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy) put forward to solve the problem of war during the first half of the twentieth century: a period that began with the Anglo-Boer war and that ended with the explosion of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such ideas do not belong to a homogeneous tradition of thought, but can be understood as a unique discourse that takes different characteristics according to the point of view of e...