In Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Snow Country, the protagonist Shimamura refers to an “old book” which gave him in-depth knowledge about the region known in Japan as the “Snow Country”. The name of the book is not disclosed by Kawabata, but it is now known that the “old book” is Hokuetsu Seppu (first published in 1837), written by Su…[Read more]

Introduction to a special issue on Renaissance post-humanism and its afterlives.

VARIEDADES is a Spanish conversation book for the student at the intermediate / advanced intermediate level. Through audiovisual activities, the student is expected to put their previous knowledge into practice and continue to develop their ability to understand, write, listen, and speak in Spanish.
VARIEDADES offers communicative activities…[Read more]

This article is a slightly revised version of a plenary panel address presented at the ‘Passages’ Symposium at the Sorbonne, Paris on the 12th of June 2019, in honor of the centenary of the birth of the American poet Robert Duncan. The article traces some of the mutual interest and influence between the poets Robert Duncan and Hilda Doolittle…[Read more]

It is well known that the literary history of Latin America and its canon has been/is written by a patriarchal Eurocentric society that controls what constitutes national literature. It is also established that (colonial/contemporary) Latin American subjects in the periphery of the urban republic of letters are not included due to their gender…[Read more]

New directions of research in colonial women’s studies on gender roles, periphery and margins, and discursive practices that expand the notion of “literary text” (Adorno 177), indicate that the textual corpus of colonial women’s writings continues to increase. This emergent group of texts reveals patterns of rhetorical strategies and recurre…[Read more]

In the opening of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (1904), the protagonist, Elizabeth, comes across Marianne North’s autobiography, Recollections of a Happy Life (1894) and her description of the bathing near Putbus, “a sandy cove where the water was always calm, and of how you floated about on its crystal surface, and be…[Read more]

It is apparent that George Eliot’s novels were heavily engaged with development in natural history; her metaphors made use of and reflected on mid-1800s discussions of evolution and taxonomy. In this essay, research in science history and Eliot studies leads to evidence of how, in Felix Holt (1866), Eliot was influenced by evolutionary s…[Read more]

The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationship between literature and society in the late-colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes, and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke…[Read more]

Shakespeare scholarship has long been interested in the temporal dynamics of The Winter’s Tale, and has often turned to melancholic or traumatic time frames to explain the thematic persistence of lost time in Shakespeare’s romance. In this chapter, I argue that dance provides a key interpretive framework for understanding the play’s interest in bo…[Read more]

A paper describing an undergraduate course on science and literature in the Italian cultural tradition.

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form overturns Eurocentric genealogies and globalizing generalizations about “world literature” by examining the complex, contradictory history of naturalist fiction. Christopher Laing Hill traces the history of naturalist fiction from its emergence in France in the 1860s through its spr…[Read more]

This essay analyzes contemporary politics of truth across overlapping contexts: the predicament of whistleblowers, the proliferation of digital disinformation, the extractive imperatives of data economies, and the impossibility of exposing the truth when exposé becomes itself a game. The essay reads the recent cultural and political interest in…[Read more]

From the volume’s introduction: “Il primo capitolo di Charles L. Leavitt IV introduce la sezione ricostruendo il contesto culturale del ‘neo-umanesimo’ esistenzialista che si diffuse nell’immediato dopoguerra e che influì profondamente sul modo di raccontare e comprendere lo sterminio nazista. Vedendo in Elio Vittorini un autore che si inserì nel…[Read more]

The Oulipo has claimed that foreign member, Italo Calvino, was a key proponent of the clinamen, a purposeful deviation from the strict constraints in which the group specializes. However, upon closer inspection, Calvino’s Oulipian production during his Paris period does not seem to advance a formalized definition of this tool of constrained w…[Read more]

This article reconsiders the post-war reaction against Benedetto Croce, focusing on the critical reappraisal of Crocean historicism that followed the defeat of Italian Fascism. Motivated by a growing sense of historical uncertainty, Italians increasingly dissented from Croce, but they remained more wedded to Crocean thought – and in particular t…[Read more]

Largely ignored by scholarship and increasingly occluded in historical memory, Tombolo was once so central to Italian culture and politics that even allusive references to the term could conjure the doubt, anxiety, and indignation of a society working to recover after the war. A pine grove located between Pisa and Livorno, Tombolo housed a large…[Read more]