Toronto Italian Studies

Food and Emotions in Italian Women's Writing analyses the themes of food and emotion in fiction, poetry, and historical writing by Italian women over a period of one hundred years.

This book analyses the media, cultural, and testimonial narratives of ransom kidnapping in Italy, a phenomenon linked to banditry and organized crime that terrorized the country for decades.

Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court reconstructs the life, work, and legacy of an extraordinary woman and prolific writer of the seventeenth century.

Ariosto in the Machine Age reimagines reception theory through the modern afterlife of a Renaissance literary icon.

This is the first bilingual annotated edition of two landmark autobiographies by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Italian women poets.

This unabridged, annotated English translation of Jacopo Caviceo’s Peregrino brings this popular Italian Renaissance romance to English readers for the first time.

On Amistà comprehensively examines the value of friendship in late medieval Italy.

Boccaccio’s Florence draws on extensive archival research to reveal Boccaccio as a political figure and to show how deeply politics impacted his life and his work.

Generations of Empire rethinks modern Mediterranean history through changing generational dynamics and representations of youth.

Mussolini, Architect documents the numerous ways in which Mussolini used architecture to shape Italy and its citizens.

This collection of original essays from leading scholars breaks new ground in our understanding of the tales belonging to the Ninth Day of the ​Decameron.

Veronica Franco in Dialogue reconsiders the literary and cultural significance of a well-known sixteenth-century Venetian courtesan and writer.

A Sudden Frenzy explores the intellectual and cultural history of improvisation and oral poetry in Renaissance Italy.

This book explores the Italian film landscape with a focus on cinematic achievements of the twenty-first century.

Feeding Fascism uses food as a lens to examine how women’s efforts to feed their families became politicized under the Italian dictatorship.

The expert readings in this collection explore the ten stories of Day Six of Boccaccio's Decameron – a day that involves meditations on language, narration, and meaning

Through the prism of the rise and fall of Galeazzo Ciano (1903–1944), this biography is a comprehensive study of a leading member of the fascist regime other than Benito Mussolini.

This book provides a material and social history of the art of Giuseppe Penone, a leading protagonist of Arte Povera, whose work explores the interconnectedness of humans and the phenomenal world.

Modernist Idealism develops a framework for understanding modernist production as the artistic realization of philosophical concepts elaborated in German idealism.

This compilation of eleven essays offers exciting new perspectives on one of the greatest works of Italian literature.

Based on meticulous research in the archives of some of the most prominent Italian avant-garde writers, Poetry on Stage examines the literary and ideological climate of the sixties and seventies.

Stories about pranks figure prominently in Boccaccio’s Decameron. This book explores Boccaccio’s poetics of repetition, accumulation, and contiguity in Day Eight, a day rich in tales of practical jokes.

This book seeks to redefine, recontextualize, and reassess Italian neorealism – an artistic movement characterized by stories set among the poor and working class – through innovative close readings and comparative analysis.

This book examines the many ways in which anger and indignation shape authorial intentions and determine the products of contemporary Italian artists.

The Court and Its Critics focuses on the disillusionment with courtliness, the derision of those who live at court, and the open hostility toward the court, themes common to Renaissance culture.

This book explores Kafka’s sometimes surprising connections with key Italian writers, from Italo Calvino to Elena Ferrante, who shaped Italy’s modern literary landscape.

The first biography of the Jewish poet and polemicist Sarra Copia Sulam situates her in the tradition of women’s writing in Venice and explores her rise and fall as a public intellectual in the tumultuous world of the city’s presses.

Mafia Movies: A Reader provides incisive interpretations of over fifty films and television programs about the Italian and Italian-American Mafias.

The Dramaturgy of the Spectator describes the development of the modern theatre spectator, the modern playwright, and their complex relationship with sovereignty, power structures, and the emergent public sphere in the seventeenth through the eighteenth century.

The Quiet Avant-Garde explores how crepuscularism and futurism, two early-twentieth-century Italian movements, have redefined the relation between the human and the nonhuman.

This annotated enumerative bibliography lists all English-language translations of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian literature.

This is the first book-length study to address the question of religion in contemporary Italian cinema and television. It questions why religion persists on Italian screens and how this reflects and constructs Italy’s emerging post-secularity.

Providing a year-by-year account of Benedetto Croce’s initiatives, author Fabio Fernando Rizi fills the gap in Croce’s biography, covering aspects of his public life often neglected, misinterpreted, or altogether ignored

This ground-breaking study of Italian-Canadian writers and artists with roots in Istria and Dalmatia highlights the history of their diaspora, the vitality of their literary and artistic works, and the distinctive multiculturalism that characterises them.

Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces explores the performative aspects of early modern theatre architecture and design, explicating the aesthetic function of pictorial displacements, visual anomalies, and architectural paradoxes

A decisive contribution to the study of Carlo Michelstaedter, Italian writer and philosopher.

Reconsidering Boccaccio explores the exceptional social, geographic, and intellectual range of the Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio, his dialogue with voices and traditions that surrounded him, and the way that his legacy illuminates the interconnectivity of numerous cultural networks.

Moral Combat explores dozens of primary texts to ask why women’s militarism became one of the central discourses of sixteenth-century Italy.

Through close readings of key texts, including spiritual writings, fairy tales, and a botanical treatise, Golden Fruit examines the role of oranges in Italian culture from their introduction during the medieval period through to the present day.

Measured Words brings together rarely discussed Renaissance thinkers to show both the commonalities within and the variety of the conversations between computation and writing.

The Italian Antimafia, New Media, and the Culture of Legality is the first book to examine the online battles between the mafia and its growing cohort of opponents.

The Story-Takers charts new territory in public pedagogy through an exploration of the multiple forms of communal protests against the mafia in Sicily.

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.

Selena Daly’s work is the first comprehensive study of Futurism during the First World War period. In this book, she examines the cultural, political, and military engagement of the Futurists with the war effort, both on the battlefields and on the home front.

On Friendship and Freedom contains the first published collection of correspondence between Silone and his longtime friend the philanthropist and art collector Marcel Fleischmann.

Building on recent Petrarch scholarship and broader studies of medieval poetics, poetic narrativity, and biblical intertextuality, Peterson conducts a rigorous examination of the Fragmenta’s poetic language.

In Reading as the Angels Read, Ardizzone reconstructs the cultural and socio-political background that provided the motivation for the Banquet and offers a bold new reading of this ambitious work.

Benedict XIV and the Enlightenment offers a comprehensive assessment of Benedict’s engagement with Enlightenment art, science, spirituality, and culture.

In Primo Levi and the Identity of a Survivor, Nancy Harrowitz examines the complex role that Levi’s cultural identity played in his choices of how to portray his survival, as well as his exposition of topics such as bystander complicity.

Baroque Visual Rhetoric probes the Baroque’s combination of style and message and the methodological basis on which the critical art historian comes to establish that meaning.

The Commentaries of Pope Pius II (1458–1464) and the Crisis of the Fifteenth-Century Papacy demonstrates the role that Pius and his writings played in the evolution of the Renaissance papacy.

In Dante’s Idea of Friendship, Filippa Modesto offers sharp readings of the Commedia, Vita Nuova, and Convivio that demonstrate Dante’s interest in that theme.

Benini illuminates the radical politics embedded within Pasolini’s adoption of Christian themes.

Marilyn Migiel returns to Giovanni Boccaccio’s masterpiece, this time to focus on the dialogue about ethical choices that the Decameron creates with us and that we, as individuals and as groups, create with the Decameron.

Anna Maria Ortese: Celestial Geographies features a selection of essays by established Ortese scholars that trace her remarkable creative trajectory.

Based on archival work and Quaintance’s exceptional knowledge of Venetian dialect poetry, Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice is an unprecedented window into the understudied world of Venetian literature.

In Speaking Spirits, Sherry Roush presents the first systematic study of early modern Italian eidolopoeia.

Using a rich assortment of scientific, medical, and popular literature, Natasha V. Chang’s The Crisis-Woman examines the donna-crisi’s position within the gendered body politics of fascist Italy.

Using an interdisciplinary methodology that includes archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, literary criticism, and spatial analysis, The Beautiful Country reveals destination Italy’s paramount role in the creation of modern mass tourism.

Combining close textual readings with a broad theoretical perspective, this book is a study of the ways in which gender shapes the characters and narratives of seven important Italian novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

An insightful history of book reviewing as a genre and a detailed study of its role in Italian literary culture, Reviewing Mario Pratesi opens up a new area for investigation within Italian literary studies.

Paola Bonifazio investigates the ways in which films sponsored by Italian and American government agencies promoted a particular vision of modernization and industry and functioned as tools to govern the Italian people.

In The Drama of the Assimilated Jew, Lucienne Kroha makes Bassani’s personal and literary journey accessible to English-language readers.

In this book, Chiara Ferrari interrogates how the rhetoric of sacrifice was used by the Italian fascist regime throughout the interwar years to support its totalitarian project and its vision of an all-encompassing bond between the people and the state.

Enriched by stories drawn from the files, which often allowed the accused to speak in their own voices, Punishment and Penance provides a window into the workings of a tribunal in this period.

In this study, Robert Casillo and John Paul Russo look at both Italy and Italian America to explore the paradoxical representation of Italy as the originator of modernity that has resisted many modern tendencies.

Edward Goldberg reveals the dramas of daily life behind the scenes in the Pitti Palace and in the narrow byways of the Florentine Ghetto, using thousands of new documents from the Medici Granducal Archive.

Piero Gobetti's New World is both an introduction to Gobetti's thought and an in-depth study of the three main questions on which his writings focus: the relationship between Italian history and fascism, the nature of a genuine antifascist political culture, and the crisis of Italian liberalism in his day.

Mafia and Outlaw Stories from Italian Life and Literature takes a unique and intriguing approach to the subject of the Mafia, and offers informed judgements about its historical impact on Italian society and culture.

Drawing upon Italy’s distinct socio-cultural history as well as feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to film, Colleen Ryan-Scheutz explores the ways in which Pasolini’s representations of women reveal his concerns about the corruption of modern society.

Vincenzo Consolo is counted by many critics among the most significant voices in contemporary world literature. This volume makes available for the first in English an edited and annotated volume of Consolo's short stories, essays, and other writings pertaining to the diverse cultures and histories of Sicily and the Mediterranean basin.

This set of twelve essays by one of the leading scholars in the field represents an authoritative view of the modern Italian intellectual tradition, its relationship with fascism, and its enduring implications for history, politics, and culture in Italy and beyond.

Examining the breadth and scope of censorship in Fascist Italy, from Mussolini's role as 'prime censor' to the specific experiences of female writers, this is a fascinating look at the vulnerability of culture under a dictatorship.

A work of considerable importance both for and teachers and students of Dante studies, Dante's

Hermeneutics of Salvation

Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) is generally recognized as one of the most important writers of his period.

As an investigation of new expressive processes and stylistic experiences, The Invention of Modern Italian Literature situates prominent Italian writers within the context of modern literature.

Ideally suited to course use, and written with great lucidity, Italian Cultural Lineages will prove fascinating to students, academics, and general readers alike.

Bringing a wealth of scholarship and insight into Scorsese's work, Casillo's study will captivate readers interested in the director's magisterial artistry, the rich social history of Southern Italy, Italian American ethnicity, and the sociology and history of the Mafia in both Sicily and the United States.

Of interest to students and scholars of literature, cultural history, and Italian, World's Fairs Italian-Style provides a fascinating glimpse into a hitherto unexplored area of study, and brings to light a cultural phenomenon that played a significant role in shaping Italy's national identity.

The Novel as Investigation will be of interest to a broad audience of readers, including those interested in Italian and comparative literature, Italian social history, and cultural studies.

Writing to Delight also serves as an instrument for a critical investigation of both the cultural productions of nineteenth-century Italy and the process of formation of modern Italian identities.

An original and challenging work, The Quest for Epic documents the development of Italian narrative from the chivalric romance at the end of the fifteenth century to the genre of epic in the sixteenth century.

Intended as a text for students in second-year university and beyond, Vite italiane brings together discussions with Italians from different regions and backgrounds, who speak candidly about a wide range of experiences.

Italian Futurist Poetry contains more than 100 poems (both Italian and English versions) by sixty-one poets from across Italy.

Taking a philological and feminist approach, and drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of the grotesque body and on the poetics of transgression, The Ugly Woman is a unique look at the essential counterdiscourse of the celebrated Italian poetic canon and a valuable contribution to the study of women in literature.

These definitions and the complexities inherent in the different cultural, legal, and political positions of Italy's people are at the heart of Migration Italy, a unique work of immense importance for understanding society in both modern-day Italy and, indeed, the entire European continent.

Italian Modernism was written in response to the need for an historiographic and theoretical reconsideration of the concepts of Decadentismo and the avant-garde within the Italian critical tradition.

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Dante, Cinema, and Television demonstrates the many subtle ways in which Dante's Divine Comedy has been given 'new life' by cinema and television, and underscores the tremendous extent of Dante's staying power in the modern world.

The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso is the first critical study to bring together the three poets in a coherent vision that maps changes while uncovering continuities.

This study suggests that some of the contentious views proposed by the neoavanguardia anticipated a wide range of issues that continue to be significant and pressing to this day.

The Other Futurism looks at particular examples of literature, visual arts, and the performing arts and, using a series of rare documents, sheds new light on the complex cultural and political issues at the heart of this neglected chapter in Italy's history.

This inaugural book in a new series of critical essays on the Decameron will provide an important guide to reading the complex series of narratives that constitute the opening of the Decameron and will serve as a guide to reading the entire work.

In this work Luca Somigli discusses several European artistic movements – decadentism, Italian futurism, vorticism, and imagism – and argues for the centrality of the works of F.T. Marinetti in the transition from a fin de siécle decadent poetics, exemplified by the manifestoes of Anatole Baju, to a properly avant-garde project.

Aretino's Satyr is richly illustrated with examples of the visual media used by the writer to create his persona. These include portraits by major artists, and arti minori: engravings, portrait medals and woodcuts.

Migiel challenges readers to pay attention to Boccaccio's language and ultimately, Migiel contends, the stories of the Decameron suggest that as women become more empowered, the limitations on them, including the threat of violence, become more insistent.

Eco's Chaosmos demonstrates how Eco's use of semiotic theory is important for an understanding of the postmodern aspects of today's literature and culture.

The author claims that his study of fascist historic culture opens the way to an understanding and re-evaluation of the historical relationship between the modernist critique of historical consciousness and the rise of post-modernist forms of temporality.

The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone raises complex theoretical issues about authorship and audiences and about the relationship between text and context.

One of the few book-length English-language works on Calvino's early writings, Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literatur will prove to be an indispensable tool to Italianists and literary studies scholars.

This collection of essays brings together twelve noted Italian and American scholars to provide a complete picture of Ariosto and all his works as an integration of tradition and invention.

From Fascism to Democracy expands on the common understanding of what is 'political' to examine how such factors as popular piety, gender, and historical memory became intertwined with the politics of Italy's fledgling democracy.

Giuliana Minghelli uses Italo Svevo's parodic Darwinian fable of the prehistoric encounter between the weak and 'unfinished' man and an incommensurable other to reassess his eccentric contribution to 20th century literature.

Through numerous examples, Roush highlights the non-linear development of this mixed genre, and shows how poetic self-commentaries respond to unique literary, historical, and political exigencies, and offer keys to understanding the underlying poetic message.

Groundbreaking and original, this study is the first to examine the contribution of women to the Republic of Letters of the Settecento, and will revise prevailing notions of eighteenth-century Italian culture and academia.

Carlo Testa demonstrates that while pairings of famed directors and writers are commonplace in modern Italian cinema, the study of the interrelation between Italian cinema and European literature has been almost completely neglected in film scholarship.

This collection of essays brings Fellini criticism up to date, employing a range of recent critical filters, including semiotic, psychoanalytical, feminist and deconstructionist.

While other scholars have noted Cavalcanti's Averroism, Ardizzone is the first to analyse it in light of sciences such as optics or logic, focusing on new issues of intellectual debate of Cavalcanti's time, as, for instance, the medieval theory of matter.

Examines how the artists and intellectuals of post-war Italy dealt with the 'shameful' heritage of their fascist upbringing and education by trying to craft a new cultural identity for themselves and the country.

In this collection of six scholarly essays on the Italian language, Giulio Lepschy discusses issues ranging from Italian literary and spoken history to prosody and a play of the Italian Renaissance.

This book takes as its starting point a striking paradox: that the antique tradition of the art of memory — created by an oral culture — reached its moment of greatest diffusion during an age that saw the birth of the printed book.

Mazzotta traces how major medieval and Renaissance thinkers invented their worlds through utopias, magic, science, art, and theatre and calls for the necessity to study the Renaissance in terms of the ongoing conversation of the arts and sciences.

An analysis of the confinement experience in Italian narrative between 1930 and 1960, covering the last years of Fascism. Not limiting herself to prisons, Nerenberg also explores military barracks, convents, and brothels as carceral homologues.

Comanini's impressive erudition makes his treatise an excellent barometer of the state of scholarship in the Counter-Reformation era. This translation is a long-overdue addition to the field of Renaissance studies.

Ricci's book ranges widely over Calvino's oeuvre to illustrate the accuracy of the idea articulated by Calvino himself that a visual image lies at the origin of all his narrative.

A fresh reading of Dante’s major literary works – the Divine Comedy and the Vita nuova – that combines central tenets of incarnational theology and dialectical thought to challenge a dominant paradigm in Dante criticism.

Filling a major gap in the curriculum of undergraduate and graduate programs in Italian linguistics, this is a text on Italian linguistics that clearly presents all of the key concepts in a form designed specifically for English-speaking students.

Recognized as a master of Italian cinema, Vittorio De Sica is perhaps best known and most respected for his critically acclaimed neorealist films of the period 1946–55. This anthology reveals, however, that his production was remarkably multifaceted.

Understanding Italo Calvino’s love of storytelling is pivotal to understanding the cultural and literary matrix of his lush fictional universe. A rich and vibrant critical portrait of Calvino’s work.

This collection brings together a variety of critical perspectives on Ginzburg's work for an English-speaking audience. What emerges is a nuanced and complex portrait of Ginzburg and her work.

The first book-length study in any language of Celati’s entire body of work, this monograph ranges over a broad landscape of critical thought and creative writing.

Paynter discusses the many controversial issues relating to Silone and his writing and argues that a profound simplicity is at the core of Silone’s writing.

The first comprehensive examination of autobiographical prison literature from Italy. Writings from prison by more than three dozen Italian political figures and intellectuals cover periods from the Italian Renaissance to the 1970’s.

Italy possesses two literary canons, one in the Tuscan language and the other made up of the various dialects of its many regions. This book presents for the first time an overview of the principal authors and texts of Italy’s literary canon in dialect.

The foremost Italian philosopher of the first half of the 20th century, Croce's influence extended to every aspect of Italian intellectual life. This collection explores the depth,originality, and significance of his thought.

This groundbreaking study of Gadda’s narrative form identifies Gadda’s complex ‘baroque’ style as not merely an aesthetic conceit, but an expression of modern alienation and of loss, grief, and the need for solitude in the face of a fragmented reality.

30 lessions, each one introducing a conversational theme centred around a crossword puzzle. An ideal tool for learning Italian that will provide a dynamic and enjoyable course supplement appropriate for both beginning and more advanced students.

Essays discuss the texts of Luigi Pirandello, one of the literary giants of this century and present an up-to-date re-evaluations of Pirandello's works, including his poetry, novels, short stories, plays, essays, letters, and memoirs.

Italy's University of Padua attracted a notable body of students from Renaissance England.Woolfson looks at the reasons so many Englishmen went to Padua and the various ways in which their studies impacted on Tudor life and thought.

This bibliography lists English-language translations of twentieth-century Italian literature published chiefly in book form between 1929 and 1997, encompassing fiction, poetry, plays, screenplays, librettos, journals and diaries, and correspondence.

Terpening shows that not only did Dolce make interesting contributions to Italian literature, but he also played a decisive role in the formation and diffusion of late Cinquecento culture.

The essays in this volume probe current critical assumptions about the celebrated Italian poet, literary theorist, moral philosopher, political theorist.

An outstanding collection of readings in Italian designed to introduce language students to contemporary Italian culture while developing their skills in reading, speaking, writing, and listening.

Rumble offers a comparative study based on the concept of 'aesthetic contamination,' which is fundamental to the understanding of Pasolini's poetics.

Gieri traces a history of the Pirandellian mode in cinema and investigates its characteristics, demonstrating the original nature of Italian filmmaking that is particularly indebted to Pirandello's interpretation of humour.

A reexamination of Pasolini life and work as a poet, novelist, filmmaker, journalist and cultural theorist reflecting new developments in semiotics, post-structuralist theory, and historical research on Italian literature and film.

Ronnie Ferguson has confronted the much-neglected problem of `false friends,' or deceptive cognates, with a dictionary which makes it possible for the student of Italian to alert her- or himself to the pitfalls.

Cherchi offers an innovative interpretation and a close reading of selected poems. He traces the history of Provençal lyric poetry, highlighting some of the significant personalities and movements.

In L’italiano si impara in due students work in pairs. The situations and contexts are typical of Italian society, combining topics of interest to contemporary Italian youth with traditional elements of Italian culture.

This volume presents a selection of poems in the original Italian, with introductory material and notes in English.