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Over the last decade, Samuel Beckett's popularity has rocketed around the world and he is increasingly recognised as one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century but there has been very little scholarly work on Beckett's reception outside Europe. This comprehensive volume brings together essays from leading critics on Beckett's international critical reception. Due to Beckett's linguistic and artistic abilities, he was intimately involved in the translation and production of his writings in German, French, English and Spanish; and consequently countries using these languages have sophisticated critical traditions. However, many other countries have adopted Beckett as their own, from places where he lived for lengthy periods of his life (England, France, Ireland and Germany), to those finding directly applicable political messages in his work (such as ex-Soviet states including the Czech Republic and Romania), and those countries whose national literary traditions bear heavily upon his work (e.g. Norway and Italy). This fascinating volume reveals Beckett's evolving critical reception from contemporary reviews to the present.
Beckett’s dialogue with the arts (music, painting, digital media) has found a growing critical attention, from seminal comprehensive studies (Oppenheim 2000; Harvey, 1967, to name just two) to more recent contributions (Gontarski, ed., 2014; Lloyd, 2018). Research has progressively moved from a general inquiry on Beckett beyond the strictly literary to issues related to intermediality and embodiment (Maude, 2009; Tajiri, 2007), post humanism and technology (Boulter, 2019; Kirushina, Adar, Nixon eds, 2021), intersections with popular culture (Pattie and Stewart, eds., 2019). However, a specific analysis on Beckett’s relationship with Italian arts and poetry on one side–and on Italian artists’ response to Beckett’s oeuvre on the other–is still missing. The volume offers an original examination of Beckett’s presence on the contemporary Italian cultural scene, a stage where he became (and still is) the fulcrum of some of the most significant experimentations across different genres and media. The reader will look at him as an “Italian” artist, in constant dialogue with the most significant modern European cultural turns.
As humans re-negotiate their boundaries with the nonhuman world of animals, inanimate entities and technological artefacts, new identities are formed and a new epistemological and ethical approach to reality is needed. Through twelve thought-provoking, scholarly essays, this volume analyzes works by a range of modern and contemporary Italian authors, from Giacomo Leopardi to Elena Ferrante, who have captured the shift from anthropocentrism and postmodernism to posthumanism. Indeed, this is the first academic volume investigating narrative configurations of posthuman identity in Italian literature and film.
This edited collection explores the image of the wound as a ‘cultural symptom’ and a literary-visual trope at the core of representations of a new concept of selfhood in Early Modern Italian and English cultures, as expressed in the two complementary poles of poetry and theatre. The semantic field of the wounded body concerns both the image of the wound as a traumatic event, which leaves a mark on someone’s body and soul (and prompts one to investigate its causes and potential solutions), and the motif of the scar, which draws attention to the fact that time has passed and urges those who look at it to engage in an introspective and analytical process. By studying and describing the transmission of this metaphoric paradigm through the literary tradition, the contributors show how the image of the bodily wound—from Petrarch’s representation of the Self to the overt crisis that affects the heroes and the poetic worlds created by Ariosto and Tasso, Spenser and Shakespeare—could respond to the emergence of Modernity as a new cultural feature.
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As teachers well know, the elements that make Thomas Pynchon exciting to read and study—the historical references, the multilayered prose, and the postmodern integration of high and low cultures and science and literature—often constitute hurdles to undergraduate and graduate readers alike. The essays gathered in this volume turn these classroom challenges into assets, showing instructors how to make the narratives' frustration of reader expectations not only intellectually rewarding but also part of the joy of reading The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and other Pynchon works, short and long. Like all volumes in the Approaches to Teaching series, the collection open...
Essays on poets and dramatists of the seicento, the seventeenth-century period of Italian literature and art. Examines the challenge that the Baroque movement posed to the neo-Aristotelian aesthetics of the Renaissance and to the notions of decorum and morality in art.
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