Giovanna Summerfield

By analyzing the Kantian response to the query What is Enlightenment?, esotericism, and, more specifically, Freemasonry as a spiritual search, this study offers a re-interpretation of the eighteenth century, one in which Enlightenment, as the predominance of rationalism, and Illuminisme are viewed as complementary rather than antithetical. By focusing on the history and nature of continental Freemasonry and the Masonic affiliation of two French authors as expressed in their work--Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin and Dominique Vivant Denon--this study addresses issues of importance today. Links between material possessions, human self-realization, and regeneration, which were exploited by these writers, call for a new look at the esoteric origins of and component in psychoanalysis, spirituality, sexuality, and power, and, ultimately, cause us to view our modern society as, in part, the inheritor of a spiritual legacy from the eighteenth century

Mystifying Enlightenment

Credere aude

Claudia Karagoz

The island of Sicily has for centuries been a meeting point where civilizations transformed one another and gave life to the cultural developments at the foundation of European modernity. The essays collected here explore Sicily as a place where these cultural interactions have produced conflict but also new material and intellectual exchange.

Migration, Exchange, Reinvention

Sicily and the Mediterranean

Lisa Downward

New Perspectives on the European Bildungsroman reflects the change in direction of research on the Bildungsroman, focusing on more psychological, authorial and feminist contents.Departing from the father of the prototype of the genre, Goethe, the authors trace imperative pathways to its French, British, and Italian counterparts, examining spiritual and female Bildungsromane. A wide-ranging analysis provides fresh insights into the genre through comparative analyses of Bildungsromane both diatopically and diachronically, while critical analysis of novels such as Voltaire's Candide, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, Collodi's Pinocchio, Aleramo's Una donna present new readings of the characters, plots and purposes of the most famous European novels.

New Perspectives on the European Bildungsroman

With its physical beauty and kaleidoscopic cultural background, Sicily has long been a source of inspiration for filmmakers. Twelve new essays by international scholars--and additional writings from directors Roberta Torre, Giovanna Taviani, and Costanza Quatriglio--seek to offset the near-absence of scholarship focusing on the relationship between the Mediterranean island and cinema. Touching on class relations, immigration, gender and poverty, the essays examine how Sicily is depicted in fiction, satire and documentaries. Situated between North and South, East and West, innovation and tradition, authenticity and displacement, Sicily acts as a microcosm of the world, a place to explore numerous narratives and develop intercultural dialogue. It is also the center of cinematographic discussions and events such as the Taormina Film Festival and the SalinaDocFest. The volume presents Sicily almost as a character and creator in its own right.

Essays on the Representation of the Island and Its Culture

Sicily on Screen

Federica Santini

Through a series of original analyses of poetic works belonging to the Italian canon or purposely posing themselves at the margins of it, this book seeks to highlight poetry as an art form which has the capacity to show the incongruities of society, not just semantically, but especially through the use it makes of signifiers, which allow meaning to come through notwithstanding linear communication. Specifically, this volume identifies and analyzes a line of diverse early modern to contemporar...

Poetry and Social Activism in Early-Modern through Contemporary Italy

The Politics of Poetics

In spite of our clever and urban modern logic, our sharp common sense of destruction and reaction versus the more gratifying construction and proactive action, we still weave talionic plots that go beyond staged tragedies and past eras. Revenge continues to be popular in fiction as in non-fictional realms. As an audience, we enjoy films and books that hail the ‘getting even’ philosophy; even our most renowned children’s stories are seeded in vindication and retribution (Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood, and Snow White, just to name a few), as our television programs, targeted to a more mature audience, are intended to be (see Charmed and Scrubs, as just two successful examples). This volume provides a riveting account of the role of revenge as muse to many characters of modern literature from various national origins and of modern societies with their own embedded cultural reactions as well as a diversity of approaches to wishes of violent counterattacks. Through a plurality of literary subjects and perspectives, this publication provides an overview much needed in our libraries and bookstores. Departing from the psychological complexities in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the contributors of this volume focus on chivalric avenges, models for violence management, and reinterpretations of the code of honor through the analysis of Hispanic, Italian, and French texts; emphasize the patient craftiness and adroit deceit of which women are capable, outmaneuvering men and their cold manipulations; provide documented incidents involving more than fictitious personages as in the case of an Italian portraitist active between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This volume is a unique collection of topics, with a useful and practical approach to an abrasive phenomenon that remains relevant in our modern times.

Essays on Honor and Revenge

Vendetta

In an era of globalization and European standardization, dialect, patois, and linguistic pastiche are marks of identity, of individual and regional nature. Paraphrasing the words of Luigi Pirandello, one tends to use the standard national language to express the concept, while one opts to use one’s regional dialect to express the feeling. The literary tradition has always accepted language mixing. Linguists and literary critics have studied this phenomenon from different perspectives. No in-depth treatment, however, has been offered so far as to the causes, conditions, consequences, and limits of language mixing from both the linguistic and literary points of view. The aim of this book is to start to fill this lack of analysis. Through a plurality of literary subjects, perspectives, and linguistic environments, this publication provides an overview of the linguistic and cultural contributions which underline, in turn, the importance of dialect use and conservation. This book recognizes the international and topical scope of interest in the academia and the public at large both through the contributions made by the authors of the respective essays, who come from various parts of the world and from a wide range of disciplines, and also through the international and topical importance of the perspectives offered by these contributions. Contributors offer analysis of selected literary and cinematic works which reveal the intricate interweaving of morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics of various dialects, Italian, French, English, and other languages that contribute to invented codes, which, in turn, provide material for the construction of invented worlds. This publication is a must for all literary scholars, linguists, and for all students of foreign languages, linguistic and literary studies. It is a unique collection of perspectives and topics of interest to all language and literature aficionados.

Patois and Linguistic Pastiche in Modern Literature

With its physical beauty and kaleidoscopic cultural background, Sicily has long been a source of inspiration for filmmakers. Twelve new essays by international scholars—and additional writings from directors Roberta Torre, Giovanna Taviani, and Costanza Quatriglio—seek to offset the near-absence of scholarship focusing on the relationship between the Mediterranean island and cinema. Touching on class relations, immigration, gender and poverty, the essays examine how Sicily is depicted in fiction, satire and documentaries. Situated between North and South, East and West, innovation and tradition, authenticity and displacement, Sicily acts as a microcosm of the world, a place to explore numerous narratives and develop intercultural dialogue. It is also the center of cinematographic discussions and events such as the Taormina Film Festival and the SalinaDocFest. The volume presents Sicily almost as a character and creator in its own right.

Giovanna Summerfield

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