This essay examines the cultural practices and prejudices that shaped the Italian reception of German Neue Sachlichkeit in the 1920s and explores their role in the development of Italian Neorealism in the 1940s. I argue that, precisely because Italian critics approached the German critical category – and indeed all critical categorisation – wit…[Read more]

The search for a methodology for reading world literature largely entails the development of new critical paradigms, but it has also occasioned a re-examination and rehabilitation of world literature’s historical formulations. This essay reclaims a forgotten milestone, the 1946 essay “La ‘letteratura mondiale'” by the eminent Italian philologist…[Read more]

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction
with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the
United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture,
including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare P…[Read more]

In this essay, I argue that the post-war critical re-interpretation of Boccaccio’s oeuvre was central to the theory and practice of Italian Neorealism. What is more, I maintain that Neorealism significantly influenced Boccaccio studies, shaping critical approaches to Boccaccio for decades after 1945. Reading scholarly and critical studies of…[Read more]

Online at: https://screen-queens.com/2020/04/14/listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/

In this essay Queen Margaret’s curses in Richard III become part of a feminist ethics on the early modern stage. As a parrhesiast, in Foucault’s terms, Margaret speaks truth to power and claims a right of citizenship. That Margaret elicits universal revulsion from the other characters while also holding a unique, though not untroubled, pos…[Read more]

Abstract and Keywords
Part of this chapter deals with Zhu Xi’s critique of Buddhism and Daoism: his distinction of the neo-Confucian concept of pattern-principle and virtuous governance from seemingly similar Buddhist and Daoist ideas, his concern with what he saw as both schools’ lack of social and political engagement and their rejection of eth…[Read more]

How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina León Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female se…[Read more]

This critical edition of Hemingway’s 1924 version of in our time is the second of three volumes for each major state of the text. Few writers have shaped the style of twentieth century prose as did Hemingway, and it all began with the “vignettes” of in our time, which have been largely unavailable for scholars and entirely out of reach for…[Read more]

This critical edition of the 1923 state of Hemingway’s In Our Time is the first of three volumes for each major state of the text. Few writers have shaped the style of twentieth century prose as did Hemingway, and it all began with the “vignettes” in The Little Review, which have been largely unavailable for scholars and entirely out of reach for…[Read more]

This essay surveys literary criticism at the intersection of narrative theory and the Victorian novel, which often takes one of two major approaches. In the first approach, critics examine how the act of narration itself shapes and constrains Victorian narratives, whereas in the second approach, critics focus on the relationship between Victorian…[Read more]

This essay surveys literary criticism at the intersection of narrative theory and the Victorian novel, which often takes one of two major approaches. In the first approach, critics examine how the act of narration itself shapes and constrains Victorian narratives, whereas in the second approach, critics focus on the relationship between Victorian…[Read more]

W. G. Sebald and Patrick Modiano are two contemporary authors who share similar themes and literary practices. They are both fastidiously or even obsessively historical in their narrative development. And they seem preoccupied with the sins of World War II. Critics have divided feelings about their accomplishments. Skeptics say their trauma…[Read more]