Studies in Italian Culture

This series welcomes well-documented studies of any aspect of Italian literature set in the historical context of relevant social and/or cultural conditions. Comparative explorations of interdisciplinary relationships contributing to a fuller interpretation of literary values and meanings within a national or international framework will be included. This series welcomes well-documented studies of any aspect of Italian literature set in the historical context of relevant social and/or cultural conditions. Comparative explorations of interdisciplinary relationships contributing to a fuller interpretation of literary values and meanings within a national or international framework will be included. This series welcomes well-documented studies of any aspect of Italian literature set in the historical context of relevant social and/or cultural conditions. Comparative explorations of interdisciplinary relationships contributing to a fuller interpretation of literary values and meanings within a national or international framework will be included.

30 publications

Italian Modernities

ISSN: 1662-9108

The series aims to publish innovative research on the written, material and visual cultures and intellectual history of modern Italy, from the 19th century to the present day. It is open to a wide variety of different approaches and methodologies, disciplines and interdisciplinary fields: from literary criticism and comparative literature to archival history, from cultural studies to material culture, from film and media studies to art history. It is especially interested in work which articulates aspects of Italy's particular, and in many respects, peculiar, interactions with notions of modernity and postmodernity, broadly understood. It also aims to encourage critical dialogue between new developments in scholarship in Italy and in the English-speaking world. The Italian Modernities series also includes the Panoramas sub-series. These volumes provide accessible, wide-ranging, research-led accounts of significant new trends, emerging fields of study and new methodologies within work on modern Italian culture, history and related disciplines.

46 publications

Contemporary Critical Concepts and Pre-Enlightenment Literature

ISSN: 1074-6781

"Writers who worked before the beginning of rationalist universalism's triumphal period which may be ending now-explored issues of consciousness, ideology, and culture that recent criticism and critical theory, using various specialized vocabularies of concepts, have returned to the center of literäry and social criticism. These early modern figures often anticipated some of our clilemmas; How to manipulate an apparently quite mutable world and, at the same time, preserve belief in an immutable "centered" self? How to reconcile rationalist universalism with personal and cultural stability? Rene Descartes's postulate of man as the master and proprietor of an increasingly built world is fundamentally incompatible with his effort to underwrite man as a stable philosophical subject. Man's technical and linguistic mastery devours his "transcendent subjectivity." Students of literature are now using the ideas of what Larry Riggs calls "post-enlightenment thinkers"-Max Horkheimer, Jacques Lacan, Michael Foucault, Rene Girard, and others-to elucidate the implicit and explicit debates about rationalism that are embedded in literary works. This trend is most usefully seen as a renewal of contact with preoccupations that were quite current in medieval, Renaissance, and seventeenth-century European literature. To date, however, innovative criticism has focused an more recent literature. Some post-structuralists-most notably Jacques Lacan-have tried their hand at interpreting early works. Their ideas are interesting, but their knowledge of the periods in question is often weak. Manuscripts on Elizabethan and Restoration theater, French, Italian, and German writers of the medieval and Renaissance periods, and die seventeenth-century French dramatists and moralists are welcome. "

3 publications