Keala Jane Jewell

"Although in recent decades literary theorists have explored the interrelations between narrative and historical discourse, the relationship between history and poetry has remained largely unexamined. In The Poiesis of History, Keala Jewell offers insightful readings of three innovative postwar Italian poets - Pier Paolo Pasolini, Attilio Bertolucci, and Mano Luzi - who, she maintains, have developed a historicized "content of the form" with complex implications for postmodernist poetics and genre theory." "Jewell considers the historical dimensions of works by Pasolini (better known outside Italy as a film-maker), Bertolucci, and Luzi in such genres as sepulchral verse, elegy, lament, ballad, the novel in verse, and verse epic. Placing the poetry in its historical and cultural contexts, she shows how it reconceptualizes such pivotal events in twentieth-century Italian history as the agricultural strikes of 1908, the rise of Fascism in Emilia-Romagna, the death of the communist leader Antonio Gramsci, Italy's postwar reconstruction and social upheavals, and the assassination of ex-premier Aldo Moro by terrorist Red Brigades. In the light of the movement away from Hermeticism and Neorealism which has dominated Italian literature since the fifties, she examines the contributions of the three poets to literary and cultural criticism as well as to poetics." "This bold and original book will be welcomed by Italianists, literary theorists, comparatists, film historians, and theorists interested in post-modernism, genre studies, and the relations between history and literature."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Experimenting with Genre in Postwar Italy

The Poiesis of History

A culture defines monsters against what is essentially thought of as human. Creatures such as the harpy, the siren, the witch, and the half-human all threaten to destroy our sense of power and intelligence and usurp our human consciousness. In this way, monster myths actually work to define a culture's definition of what is human. In Monsters in the Italian Literary Imagination, a broad range of scholars examine the monster in Italian culture and its evolution from the medieval period to the twentieth century. Editor Keala Jewell explores how Italian culture juxtaposes the powers of the monster against the human. The essays in this volume engage a wide variety of philological, feminist, and psychoanalytical approaches and examine monstrous figures from the medieval to postmodern periods. They each share a critical interest in how monsters reflect a culture's dominant ideologies.

Monsters in the Italian Literary Imagination

Beverly Allen

Muriel Kittel

Poems by Italian women of the past and present deal with love, friendship, war, peace, the family, work, religion, and nature

Keala Jane Jewell

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