In composing The Woman of Rome (La Romana, 1948), I argue in this chapter, Moravia was attempting to redress the twinned traumas of national history and personal memory. The novel’s protagonist, a Roman prostitute, serves as the symbolic incarnation of-as well as the developing resistance to-bourgeois corruption and Fascist coercion. An intricate…[Read more]

Among the most iconic images in world cinema, the final shot of Rossellini’s Rome Open City has inspired an effusion of critical commentary but little critical consensus, instead giving rise to opposing interpretations. I argue that the shot, in which the camera pans to follow a band of children as they march on a hillside overlooking the city of…[Read more]

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]

Scholarship has for decades emphasized the significant continuities in Italian culture and society after Fascism, calling into question the rhetoric of post-war renewal. This article proposes a reassessment of that rhetoric through the analysis of five key metaphors with which Italian intellectuals represented national recovery after 1945:…[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]

Primo Levi, ‘La treva’

Review of Primo Levi, ‘Si això és un home’

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]

Numbers appear to have limited value for literary study, since our discipline is usually more concerned to explore differences of interpretation than to describe the objective features of literary works. But it may be time to re-examine the assumption that numbers are only useful for objective description. Machine learning algorithms are actually…[Read more]