Italian Studies / Italian Literature

This is the first English-language annotated edition of La reina di Scotia, one of the earliest dramatic works depicting the tragic end of Mary Queen of Scots.

This important new edition reintroduces Joseph Tusiani's classic translation of Michelangelo's poetry.

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.

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

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

Culture and Authority in the Baroque explores the baroque across a wide range of disciplines, from poetics to politics, to the rituals of musical, dramatic, and religious performance.

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

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.

My Karst and My City and Other Essays is the first book available in English on the work of Scipio Slataper, one of the most prominent intellectuals active in Trieste at the turn of the twentieth century.

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.

In Tuscan Spaces, Silvia Ross focuses on constructions of Tuscany in twentieth-century Italian literature and juxtaposes them with English prose works by such authors as E.M. Forster and Frances Mayes to expose the complexity of literary representation centred on a single milieu.

In Addressing the Letter, Laura A. Salsini considers how the works of authors including the Marchesa Colombi, Sibilla Aleramo, Gianna Manzini, Natalia Ginzburg, and Oriana Fallaci highlight such issues as love, the loss of ideals, lack of communication and connection, and feminist ideology.

Examining Dante's life-long dialogue with Augustine from a new point of view, Marchesi goes beyond traditional inquiries to engage more technical questions relating to Dante's evolving ideas on how language, poetry, and interpretation should work.

Lucamante looks at the ways in which both Italian literary tradition and external influences have assisted Italian women writers in rethinking the theoretical and aesthetic ties between author, text, and readership in the construction of the novel.

A highly original and comprehensive reading, The Poetics of Dante's Paradiso challenges established scholarly interpretations to demonstrate that the intricacies of Dante's text reveal a subtle irony, employed to deliver a sharp critique of the corrupt church and empire of his own time.