Told through the astonished eyes of a young girl, this book narrates the vicissitudes that Fiorenza Di Franco and her family lived through against the backdrop of Hungary devastated by the tragic events of World War II.

Unscathed by Fire: A Young Girl and the Italian Armistice of September 8, 1943

Biographies & Memoirs

Di Franco, Fiorenza

Historical

John Cabot University Press

This study presents a new approach to the canon of nineteenth-century English fiction by defining the ideological framework within which some of the most controversial novelists of the Victorian period inscribed their imaginative responses to a changing society and its social unrest. The book posits a radical re-visioning of such authors as Dickens, Collins, Gaskell, Gissing, and Hardy by adopting the notion of disharmony as a common thematic thread of their fictional production. While the establishment invoked moral order and social harmony, their novels and short stories configured a world beset by conflicting drives and ethical aporias. What is represented in novels like A Tale of Two Cities, The Whirlpool, and Jude the Obscure is not only a society often on the verge of collapse, but also exemplary stories in which identities are disintegrated and individual destinies are caught up in the mechanism of deceptive fantasizing leading to psychological destructiveness and silence.In the attempt to avoid any form of hermeneutical simplification of the age and its cultural debates, the rich and stimulating introduction of Victorian Disharmonies aims at portraying the social and cultural contexts as well as the major topics that attracted artistic and literary imagination---urbanization and the phenomenon of the crowd, pollution and the changing countryside, Deus Absconditus and religious doubt, medievalism and the dream of a new order. Using a critical methodology combining semiotic investigation with profound awareness of the socio-behavioral codes and historical processes of the Victorian period, chapter 1 focuses on Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities that is interpreted as a novel dramatizing a "private" and Christian version of the French revolution. Subsequent chapters, one devoted to Wilkie Collins's The Dead Secret and two to Elizabeth Gaskell's shorter fiction, analyze certain ontological and ethical tensions underlying their texts that oscillate between realistic techniques and a pursuit of Gothic sensationalism. Chapters 5 and 6, on Gissing's The Whirlpool and Hardy's Jude the Obscure, respectively, are more directly concerned with a challenging and truthful representation of protagonists confronting change and the late-Victorian contrast between old institutions and new axiological horizonsThis thought-provoking book delineates how fiction developed from Dickens's intensely Christological worldview to Gissing's self-deceptive and pessimistic humanism, from Collins's and Gaskell's patholo-gized womanhood to Hardy's intellectual wasteland where there is no room for redemption and moral rebirth. Victorian Disharmonies provides a fresh account of crucial fictional texts of the age, while its lively presentation of the literary scene will prove stimulating to readers interested in the history of Victorianism as a paradigmatic phenomenon of British culture.

Victorian Disharmonies: A Reconsideration of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction

Literature & Fiction

Marroni, Francesco

History & Criticism

A First Amendment Profile of the Supreme Court focuses on the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court and determines their frames for assessing First Amendment cases. In each of the chapters, a justice is profiled in terms of his or her claims during the nomination hearings and the positions they have taken in significant Supreme Court decisions. These chapters provide a rhetorical frame that each of these justices would find appealing regarding First Amendment case law.

A First Amendment Profile of the Supreme Court

Smith,Craig

Rules & Procedures

Beginning with a critical reappraisal of the notion of “fairy tale” and extending it to include categories and genres which are in common usage in folklore and in literary studies, this book throws light on the general processes involved in storytelling. It illuminates the fundamental ways in which a culture is formed, while highlighting important features of the Irish narrative tradition, in all its wealth and variety and in its connections with the mythical and historical events of Ireland. The Irish Fairy Tale argues that the fairy tale is a kind of “neutral zone,” a place of transition as well as a meeting place for popular beliefs and individual creativity, oral tradition and literary works, historical sources and imaginary reconstructions, and for contrasting and converging views of the world, which altogether allow for a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of reality. The book focuses on stories by Yeats and Stephens, whose approach to the subject marks the culmination of a long tradition of attempts at linking past and present and of bridging the gap between what appear to be contradictory facets of a single culture. This leads to a comparative study of Joyce’s Dubliners, which illustrates the universal and exemplary nature of the notion of fairy tale put forward in the work.

The Irish Fairy Tale: A Narrative Tradition from the Middle Ages to Yeats and Stephens

Carrassi, Vito

British & Irish

The product of over thirty years of research on the American Civil War by Italy’s most renowned authority on the subject, this study synthetically analyzes the great drama that from 1861 to 1865 devastated the United States and gave life to the modern American nation. The book also highlights how the Civil War was the first conflict of the industrial age and an often neglected premonition of the two great world wars that shook the world in the twentieth century. The short essays presented here are the texts of five lectures delivered several years ago at the Istituto Italiano di Studi Filosofici in Naples and published in Italy in 1997.

Five Lectures on the American Civil War, 1861–1865

History

LURAGHI, RAIMONDO

Americas

The collection includes four theatrical works of acclaimed Italian author, Dacia Maraini, in a dual-language format (Italian/English). The works have been chosen around the themes of distress, exclusion, and various manifestations of tragedy with particular reference to women. The works were chosen within a modern and a historical reference in order to give breadth to the main themes. The individual works include: (a) Stravaganza/Extravagance. The unfolding drama alludes to the Legge Basaglia (the so-called Basaglia Law, 180/1978), whose prescriptions included the closure of insane asylums throughout Italy; (b) Camille. In this piece, Maraini offers a reinterpretation of the storied and controversial relationship between the sculptor, Auguste Rodin, and his young apprentice/assistant, Camille Claudel; (c) Storia di Isabella di Morra raccontata da Benedetto Croce/The Story of Isabella di Morra as Told by Benedetto Croce. In this play, the power of literature and the written word (the implicit, culpable “character” in this play) culminates in atrocious homicide; (d) I digiuni di Catarina da Siena/The Fasting of Catherine of Siena. Powerful relationships dominate this account of Saint Catherine’s profound religiosity.

Extravagance and Three Other Plays

Maraini,Dacia

Dramas & Plays

In his latest book in the study of power, Giacomo Marramao focuses on the work of two great Central European writers, Elias Canetti and Herta Müller, each of whom, in different periods and contexts, offered a philosophical genealogy of forms of domination and a radical diagnosis of power, command and law. To grasp the meaning of the transformations of power, it is necessary to go to the roots: to the archē that originated it as a factor common to all human cultures and all historical periods. Power cannot be suppressed: any attempt to ‘overcome’ it (by eliminating one or another form of its exercise) has done no more than strengthen it. Power must, however, be ‘uprooted’ or subverted in its logic of identity, which is activated in the boundless character of desire and the paranoid scene of fear and the death of the Other. In the midst of today’s global world, to trace a line of opposition to power means to free ourselves from the alibi of objectivity and to focus instead on subjects and their potential for metamorphosis/regeneration. This is possible only if we detach ourselves from the ground noise of actuality and recover the broken thread of solitary and extreme works.

Against Power: For an Overhaul of Critical Theory

Marramao, Giacomo

The bilingual InVerse anthology collects the work of seventeen contemporary Italian poets. This is the seventh edition of the anthology, which provides a comprehensive and independent overview of the Italian poetic milieu.

InVerse 2018: Italian Poets in Translation

Byron’s emotional and erotic life, which he indulged with an unstoppable energy, is a key element in understanding his powerful and passionate personality, as well as the society of his day, which was scandalised by his behaviour even while being conquered by his extraordinary charm.The Sour Fruit. Lord Byron, Love & Sex looks at the poet’s now generally acknowledged bisexuality in all its aspects, from his fleeting liaisons to his love-affairs, female (his half-sister Augusta, Caroline Lamb and Teresa Guiccioli) and male (John Edleston, Nicolo Giraud and Loukas Chalandritsanos).The book’s original approach provides unusual and fascinating insights, notably into Byron’s homosexuality, hitherto relatively unexplored, and reveals a more truthful picture of the poet. Byron was strongly attracted to boys, who are referred to in Don Juan as ‘sour fruit’. In his adolescence he had fallen for aristocratic contemporaries but would later be attracted to boys of a lower social station. He had several same-sex experiences in England, encouraged by the circle he frequented at Cambridge, particularly his friend Matthews, as well as during his Grand Tour, during which he was able to freely live out behaviours frowned on at home.In early 19th-century England, homosexuality was a criminal offence punished with the pillory or even hanging, and Byron preferred to keep his transgressive experiences to himself, or share them only with a restricted group of like-minded friends. There are numerous veiled references to the range of his tastes in his works and his letters, which adopt a code aimed at the initiated that we are today better able to decipher. Innuendos abound, pointing to aspects of his submerged life, to adultery, incest and, above all, homosexuality – and we can now more fully appreciate the wit and verve of his letters as well as a clutch of agonised love-poems. An appended chapter examines Don Leon, an anonymous work purporting to be by Byron himself and salaciously recounting his love-life, which was first published some forty years after his death and has been on more than one occasion banned for obscenity.

The Sour Fruit: Lord Byron, Love & Sex

Patanè, Vincenzo

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