Italian Literature Commons^™

A Tale Of Two Nations’ Histories The Application Of Literary Fairy Tales As A Firsthand Account Of History, Nicholas Gottlob

Honors College Theses

Fairy tales are often thought to be solely for children as a means of education and entertainment. The literary fairy tale provided a medium that allowed authors to express their opinions under the guise of a story. This has not always been the case as literary fairy tales have been utilized as political instruments by authors and intended for a highly educated audience. Using fairy tales as a facade provided protection for authors, as outright criticisms against those in power usually resulted in dire consequences such as imprisonment or even death for the objector. The literary fairy tale provided a …

Literary Response To Plague, Mark Host

Developing Pedagogy Graduate Student Showcase

This is a unit with a series of assignments that has been conceptualized as a drop-in that can be included in a variety of classes such as History/Western Civilization, English, Humanities, etc. and uses The Decameron to illustrate how react to the trials of disease through artistic expression. The target students would be advanced high school students or freshman-level college students. The assignments progress to higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, starting from asking the students to simply answer reading comprehension questions about the introduction to asking students to develop their own imitative stories in the vein of The Decameron and …

Italian Jews: A Surprising And Understudied Influence In The Enlightenment, Lura Martinez

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

The experience of Italian Jews during the Enlightenment is deserving of much more attention. Not only did Italian Jews such as Moshe Ḥayyim Luzzatto, a man born in a ghetto, later embrace a form of secularism, but his works and others written by his peers made an impact on the Italian Enlightenment and seemingly contributed to the practice of toleration that appeared in sporadic installments throughout Europe. While the Jewish experience in Europe hails from a long tradition of persecution, with sporadic and incomplete periods of toleration at various points in its history, it is clear that through a promotion …

Walking And Cycling As Modalities Of Political Enunciation In Paolo Rumiz’S A Piedi (2012 ‘On Foot’) And Tre Uomini In Bicicletta (2002 ‘Three Men On Their Bikes’), Barbara Siller

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The great number of travel narratives written by Paolo Rumiz from Trieste, Italy, include books about walking and cycling, as well as travelling by train or ferry. On the one hand, these accounts present detailed descriptions of the routes taken on these journeys, depict illustrations of historic buildings, and display various types of maps, and as such, are meant to serve as walking guides (Rumiz 2012, 12). On the other hand, they become a space of reflection for a wide range of themes, including walking slowly as a way to clear your mind, to comfort your heart, and to heal …

Embodiment Of Creative Thought And Visual Logic In Bookmaking: An Example Of Intermediality In Word-Picture Adaptation, Diana Bychkova

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This interdisciplinary study discusses word-picture translation for book illustrations and brings together visual art, book/illustration history, the materiality of the book, literature, and library science. The focus is on communication between the creator, the work of literary and visual art, and the receiver. Theories that observe verbal-visual relations appear typically disconnected from the practical aspects of bookmaking and publishing. In bridging practice and theory, I have developed my own method of word-picture interpretation that can be applied to any adult fiction text.

The thesis discusses the outside and the inside of illustration-making, presents the methodology and theoretical framework, explores such …

Narrating Intensity: History And Emotions In Elsa Morante, Goliarda Sapienza And Elena Ferrante, Stefania Porcelli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the representation of emotions in My Brilliant Friend and in two Italian novels written between the 1960s and the 1970s – La Storia (1974, History: A Novel) by Elsa Morante (1912-1985) and L’arte della gioia (The Art of Joy, 1998/2008) by Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996). However, rather than remaining centered on these works’ emotive landscapes alone, I seek instead to trace the continuities that link these two “historical” novels of the past to Ferrante’s successful and more recent tetralogy. I look at the representation of emotions and at what I call “moments of intensity” – …

Il Giudizio Universale Tra La Scolastica Medievale E La Divina Commedia Di Dante, Amanda R. Latrenta

Theses and Dissertations

In The Divine Comedy, Dante presents his readers with an interpretation of The Last Judgement. Although this interpretation bears distinct markers of Dante’s originality, it also closely aligns with medieval scholastic writings on the phenomenon. This thesis examines how Dante’s interpretation aligns with or diverges from medieval theology.

Scrivere Di Islam. Raccontare La Diaspora, Simone Brioni Dr., Shirin Ramzanali Fazel

Department of English Faculty Publications

Scrivere di Islam. Raccontare la diaspora (Writing About Islam. Narrating a Diaspora) is a meditation on our multireligious, multicultural, and multilingual reality. It is the result of a personal and collaborative exploration of the necessity to rethink national culture and identity in a more diverse, inclusive, and anti-racist way. The central part of this volume – both symbolically and physically – includes Shirin Ramzanali Fazel’s reflections on the discrimination of Muslims, and especially Muslim women, in Italy and the UK. Looking at school textbooks, newspapers, TV programs, and sharing her own personal experience, this section invites us to change the …

Latin Poetry. Ludovico Ariosto. Ed. And Trans. Dennis Looney And D. Mark Possanza. The I Tatti Renaissance Library 84. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2018., Alessandro Giammei

Italian Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Chaucer's Critique Of Romance: Anelida And Arcite, Troilus And Criseyde, And The "Knight's Tale", Vivian (Yuwei) Han

Senior Projects Spring 2020

As the Father of English Literature and a significant figure who brought the tradition of romance into the Middle English vernacular, Chaucer developed a remarkable refinement and precision of use of his language in fully taking the tradition of romance from the French courtly literature into his own way of demonstration as well as adapting and transforming the innovative form of historical romance, or romanticized epic, from the Italians into his originality. This project analyses Chaucer's Anelida and Arcita, Troilus and Criseyde, and the "Knight's Tale" as his critique of romance and its ideals. is concerned with how Chaucer’s language …

La Compiuta Donzella Of Florence (Ca. 1260): The Complete Poetry, Fabian Alfie

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Translation into English of extant poems of the thirteenth-century Italian poet La Compiuta Donzella of Florence with poems addressed to her by Mastro Torrigiano and a letter to her from Guittone d'Arezzo.

The Venetian Arsenal And Dante's Poetic Purpose, Eliot Davila

Augsburg Honors Review

John Ruskin remarked that if we were to pick an "honestly studious" three or four out of every hundred of Dante's admirers, then "we should rarely find one who knew why the Venetian Arsenal was described." Indeed, the wonderfully elaborate description of the Arsenal in Inferno XXI has long posed a problem for readers of the Commedia. This paper approaches Dante's representation of the Arsenal from a new perspective and finds that a more complete understanding of the image offers readers an original insight into what can be called the poetic purpose of Dante. For clarity of presentation, the paper …

Primo Levi’S Journey Home From Auschwitz In The Light Of Ancient Civic Pilgrimage: Levi’S The Truce As A Form Of Theōria, Robert Pirro

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Primo Levi, a Jewish-Italian chemist captured with other members of a partisan band in German-occupied northern Italy and deported to Auschwitz, survived his ordeal to write one of the more acclaimed testimonies of Nazi inhumanity, Se questo è un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz). Taking as a starting point a parallel Levi explicitly draws between the aims of postwar pilgrimages to Auschwitz commemorations and the effect he hoped his books would have on his readers, this article shows how his second book, La tregua (The Reawakening), which relates his roundabout and oft-delayed journey home to Turin after the Red Army’s liberation …

The Manuscript Copy Of Sfera In The Morgan Library, Dana Hart

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the literary origins of the fifteenth century text Sfera, a rhyming Italian treatise by Gregorio Dati, and considers the patronage, creation, and function of the manuscript copy in the Morgan Library and Museum, focusing on the illustrated maps and cities.

The Body And Its Signifiers: Bodily Depictions In Niccolò De’ Conti And Odorico Da Pordenone, Antonella Dalla Torre

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines textual, bodily depictions in two western European, medieval and late-medieval travel accounts, which describe the eastern travels of the Venetian merchant Niccolò de’ Conti and those of the Franciscan friar Odorico da Pordenone. My analysis show how a connection between the characterizations of the body and the process of identity definition is forged and sustained in these texts.

Through a cultural-studies perspective, my work focuses specifically on depictions of the body in Poggio Bracciolini’s account of the travels of Niccolò de’ Conti and in the text of a vernacular rendition of Odorico da Pordenone’s Relatio, the …

Magic Performances: Rituals And Practice In Italian Theatre And Culture, 1520–1650, Erika Mazzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation investigates theatrical and historical sources that deal with early modern magic, in order to re-evaluate its role in Italian society between the 16th and the mid-17th century. During this period, many were the attempts carried out by the Catholic Church to avoid the spread of heretical beliefs among people. By the middle of the 16th century, the battle against heresy focused on magic, which was considered a dangerous practice. Despite the Inquisition’s prohibition of books of magic and the condemnation of magic rituals, magic still survived in literary works, especially theatrical. Many performances brought magic on the Italian …

Italian Americans In Bronx Doo Wop-The Glory And The Paradox, Mark Naison

Occasional Essays

No abstract provided.

Romance, Politics And Minor Art: A Nomadology Of Inamoramento De Orlando And Star Wars, Andrea Privitera

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

While existing theories of romance (in particular, those formulated by Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson) accurately characterize this literary mode as a highly politicized example of art, this thesis contends that the political nature of romance is broader and more complex than discussed so far. In order to offer a new and comprehensive political theory of romance, this work proposes a comparison between two historically and culturally diverse examples of romance, that is Matteo Maria Boiardo’s chivalric poem Inamoramento de Orlando and George Lucas’ space opera film Star Wars. By reading Boiardo and Lucas’ texts via Gilles Deleuze and …

Review Of Printers Without Borders: Translation And Textuality In The Renaissance, Joshua Reid

Joshua S. Reid

Review of Selene Scarsi . Translating Women in Early Modern England: Gender in the Elizabethan Versions of Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso. Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies Series. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010. x + 207 pp. index. bibl. $99.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–6620–2.

The Body And The Sacred In Contemporary Italian Women Writers, Laura R Feola

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation explores the presence of what has been called the “persistence of the sacred” in modern and contemporary Western culture. More specifically, I focus on the intertwining dimensions of the human body and the experience of the sacred in selected works by Dacia Maraini, Elena Ferrante, Cristina Campo, and Alda Merini. Despite their different voices, and the “secular” or “religious” labels with which each of these Italian authors could be defined or confined, I identify and analyze patterns, similarities, and differences in the interwoven realities of the body and the sacred present in their works.[1]

[1] See Snyder, …

Ansiedades Épico-Criollas Y El Mecenazgo De Indias En El Arauco Domado De Pedro De Oña, Andrea L. Fernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Among the characteristics of epic poetry are the topic of war, love encounters, heroism of exemplary individuals, and the narration of events contemporary to the audience to reinforce a collective historical identity. Arauco domado by Pedro de Oña, born in Angol (modern Chile), reiterates these traditional expectations with its protagonist, characters, setting, and latter theatrical representations within the viceregal context. The poem was made possible by the sponsorship of García Hurtado de Mendoza y Manrique, IV Marquis of Cañete and Viceroy of Peru. If the title of “espíritu cesarino novelo” [Caesar’s new spirit] (V.76.3) corresponds to the patron, Pedro de …

La Crisi Dell'identità Italiana: Ricordare E Accettare Un Passato Islamico, Mathilde Sauquet

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

From Amherst To The Other Side: The Integration Of Emily Dickinson Into The Italian Consciousness, Mia Jozwick

Dissertations and Theses

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Emily Dickinson’s poetry appeared in Italy in two key forms: anthologized alongside other American authors and in select translations by prominent Italian intellectuals including poet Eugenio Montale and writer Emilio Cecchi. Dickinson was both touted as one of the great American writers, but also kept as somewhat of an underground poet who spoke to a specific literary identity in Italy. The cross-hairs of history brought together increased knowledge of Dickinson’s poetry just as Mussolini and his fascist agenda threatened the influence of literature whether homegrown or international. What materialized was a dynamic in …

Pirandello Proto-Modern: A New Reading Of L’Esclusa, Bradford Masoni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Luigi Pirandello’s first novel, L’Esclusa, written in 1893, but not published in its definitive edition until 1927, straddles two literary worlds: that of the realistic style of the Italian veristi, and something new, a style and approach to narrative that anticipates the theory of writing Pirandello lays out in his long essay L’Umorismo, as well as the kinds of experimental writing that one associates with early-20^th-century modernism in general, and with Pirandello’s later work in particular. The novel’s living in both worlds, however, makes it an interesting and problematic text. First, it gives readers insight into …

The Disperata, From Medieval Italy To Renaissance France, Gabriella Scarlatta

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Rich with morose invectives, the Italian lyric genre of the disperata builds toward a crescendo of despair, with the speakers damning and condemning their beloved, their enemy, their destiny, Fortune, Love, and often themselves. Although Petrarch and Petrarchism have been amply analyzed as fertile sources for late Renaissance poets in France, the influence of the Italian disperata in this context has yet to receive proper scholarly attention. This study explores how the language and themes of the disperata - including hopelessness, death, suicide, doomed love, collective trauma, and damnations - are creatively adopted by several generations of poets from its …

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing And Reception Of Catherine Of Siena, Lisa Tagliaferri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing and Reception of Catherine of Siena (https://caterina.io) affirms the 14th-century mystic Catherine of Siena as a writer through contextualizing her texts among the corpus of contemporary Italian literature, and studying her reception in the Renaissance period of Italy and England. Joining an increasing body of recent meaningful scholarship that has been making significant progress to recover many overlooked and peripheral female voices of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this work serves to fully assert Catherine as a writer of work that is literarily significant and worthy of textual analysis alongside contemporary male Italian …

Mermaid Song: The Notebooks Of The Writing Woman, Gianna T. Ward-Vetrano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is built on the model of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, that is, it is a feminist project of holistic integration that does not reject fracturing, ambiguity, or contradiction, but aims to attain a more complex and thus truer portrait of the woman writing. Lessing’s notebooks examine conflicts between communism and capitalism, racial conflict in Africa, conflict between men and women, and the conflict between the protagonist Anna Wulf’s identity as a woman and her identity as a writer, each of which she then attempts to integrate into the singular golden notebook of the title. I propose …

Strangely Dark, Unbearably Bright: From The Volto Santo To The Veronica And Beyond In The Divine Comedy, Alexa Sand

Art and Design Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Poesía Amorosa De Una Erudita Del Xvii: Traducción Y Creación En El Pastor Fido De Isabel Correa, Almudena Vidorreta

Publications and Research

Este trabajo pretende insertar en el contexto humanista de su tiempo la escritura poética de Isabel Rebeca Correa, erudita portuguesa del siglo XVII que residió en Ámsterdam. Aunque no se conserva buena parte de su obra, podemos conocer el estilo de la autora a través de su traducción al español de El pastor Fido, tragicomedia pastoril de Guarini. Se incluye por primera vez una transcripción completa y modernizada de los fragmentos de dicha versión que, según la traductora, proceden de su propia inventiva. Por medio de esta amplificación de la obra del italiano, Isabel Correa legitima y justifica su …

Dante’S Divine Comedy: A Pastoral Subversion, Katie Francom

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This paper attempts to widen the scholarly understanding of Dante’s use of pastoral modes within The Divine Comedy. By examining typical pastoral themes, Dante’s use of Virgil as a guide, and the presence of pastoral themes within the Comedy, this paper will ultimately assert that Dante completely reshapes the pastoral genre, taking it from its typically pagan history and giving it new, Christian meaning. By so doing he makes his beautifully artistic story into an enlightening spiritual journey for the reader.