CULTURAL HISTORY OF MODERN ITALIAN LITERAT

This authoritative and vividly written book brings readers into the heart of Italian literary culture from the 1690s to the present. It probes the work of major authors in their broad cultural context, traces the history of audiences and publishers, explores the shifting relationship between public and private, assesses the impact of significant historical trends and events on creative processes, and establishes the continuities as well as the discontinuities of the Italian literary tradition.
A synoptic overview at the beginning of the volume is designed to help the reader get her or his bearings in the detail of the nine chapters which follow. Using an essentially chronological framework, the book is divided into three major cultural time-spans: the long eighteenth century, the decades of national identity formation and the creation of modern', industrial Italy between 1816 and 1900, and the twentieth century with its constant renegotiation of national cultural identity. A final epilogue provides a snapshot of Italian literary culture in the near-present.
This is a book which will be readily accessible to students and all those interested in Italian culture, and at the same time is based on the most up-to-date scholarship. New readings of the canonical authors rub shoulders with a refreshing attention to standard and popular writing, gender issues, and the interaction between written and oral forms, producing a history of modern Italian literature which is new in its conception and its scope.

Ann Hallamore Caesar is Professor of Italian at the University of Warwick.

Michael Caesar is Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Birmingham.

Preface and Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION: An Overview of Modern Italian Literature

PART I: The Long Eighteenth Century (1690-1815)

Chapter One: Cross-currents of modernity

§1.1. This is Arcadia

§1.2. New states, new thinkers

Chapter Two: Enlightenment and the public arena

§2.1. Journalism, theatre and the book trade in Venice

§2.2. Enlightenment and reform from Naples to Milan

Chapter Three: Literature and revolution

§3.1. Italy and France

§3.2. Alfieri: life and drama

§3.3. Foscolo: between classicism and romanticism

PART II: Literature and Unification (1816-1900)

Chapter Four: Romantic Italy

§4.1. Milan 1816

§4.2. Florence 1827

§4.3. Leopardi: the challenge of poetry

Chapter Five: Inventing the nation

§5.1. Manzoni: the responsibility of the writer

§5.2. History and fiction

§5.3. Literature and the people

§5.4. Memory, monuments and the national past

Chapter Six: Making the nation

§6.1. The literary culture of Unificaton

§6.2. The artist as observer: verismo and the social

§6.3. Looking in: domesticity and the literary market

PART III: From modernism to the market (1900 to the present)

Chapter Seven: Modernism and the crisis of the literary subject

§7. 1. The search for identity

§7.2. War, technology and the arts

§7.3. Narratives of selfhood: the subjective turn in fiction

Chapter Eight: Literature, Fascism and Anti-Fascism

§8.1. Writing and the regime

§8.2. The social condition of intellectuals

§8.3. Testing the limits of the novel

§8.4. Resistance, Reconstruction and Neo-realism

Chapter Nine: From the avant-garde to the market-place

§9.1. The last avant-garde?

§9.2. The widening of culture

§9.3. A minimalist postmodernism: the poetics of attention

§9.4. Epilogue: a weekend in April

Primary References

Secondary References

General Bibliography