Product Description: The book series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie, founded by Gustav Grober in 1905, is among the most renowned publications in Romance Studies. It covers the entire field of Romance linguistics, including the national languages as well as the lesser studied Romance languages...read more

Antonio Negri, one of Italy's most influential and controversial contemporary philosophers, offers in this book a radical new interpretation of the nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. For Negri, Leopardi is not the bitter, idealistic individualist of conventional literary history, but rather a profoundly materialist thinker who sees human solidarity as the only possible solution to the catastrophes of history and politics. Negri traces Leopardi's resistance to the transcendental idealism of Kant and Hegel, with its emphasis on reason's power to resolve real antagonisms into abstract syntheses, and his gradual development of a sophisticated poetic materialism focused on the constructive power of the imagination and its "true illusions." Like Nietzsche (who admired him), Leopardi provides an alternative to modernity within modernity, expressing a force of rupture and recomposition--a uniquely Italian one--that is as relevant now as it was in the nineteenth century, and which connects to the theory of Empire as the political constitution of the present that Negri has elaborated in collaboration with Michael Hardt.

Product Description: The present edited collection of essays on the Sicilian author Goliarda Sapienza includes contributions from established and emerging scholars working in the field of contemporary women’s writing. Essays in this volume examine Sapienza through multiple perspectives, taking into account the articulation of subjectivity through autobiographical writing and the complex representation of gender and sexual identities...read more

Through an interpretation of Montaigne's philosophical vision as expressed in his Essays, Ermanno Bencivenga contributes to the current debate about the "death of the subject" by developing a view of the self as a project of continuous construction rather than the source and foundation of knowledge. This latter, Cartesian conception of self-consciousness as a logical and epistemological starting point is, Bencivenga contends, delusive: the certainty it provides is more akin to faith than to a cognitive state. How then do we acquire knowledge of the self? Montaigne makes for a productive case study in this regard: he declares that he himself is the matter of his book, and that nothing but the constitution of his own self is his business. A study of Montaigne reveals that the fundamental category missing in the Cartesian conception of the self is that of practical effort. The self is not a ready-made entity, available for inspection and analysis, but something whose generation requires exercise, training, and discipline. It is the result of an operation that must be performed not just once, but, as in all training, over and over again until it becomes second nature. Bencivenga characterizes the particular training required by the project of constituting a subject as a revolutionary, transgressive, critical one, which shares with philosophical activity a profoundly playful irrelevance to the "ready to hand."Originally published in 1990.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Description: Here Howard Becker makes available for an English-speaking audience a collection of the provocative work of Antonio Candido, one of the leading men of letters in Brazil. Trained as a sociologist, Candido conceives of literature as a social project and is equally at home in textual analyses, discussions of literary theory, and sociological, anthropological, and historical argument...read more

Product Description: Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian literature, Gian-Paolo Biasin explores a series of challenges posited for literary criticism by the success of semiotics, testing theoretical concepts not so much on theoretical grounds as in their practical application to literary texts from the high Romantic lyric of Ugo Foscolo to the postmodern, cosmicomic tales of Italo Calvino...read more

Giuseppe Mazzotta provides both a powerful framework for reading the Decameron and an important contribution to medieval and contemporary debates in esthetics Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Description: Although midday is commonly associated with indolence or the languishing of both nature and humanity in stifling heat, Nicolas Perella shows that this connection―however real―is secondary to an archetypal encounter with noontide as a moment of existential crisis of spiritual as well as erotic dimensions...read more

Product Description: The closely related problems of creativity and freedom have long been seen as emblematic of the Renaissance. Ullrich Langer, however, argues that French and Italian Renaissance literature can be profitably reconceived in terms of the way these problems are treated in late medieval scholasticism in general and nominalist theology in particular...read more

Product Description: Despite its immediate popularity and its acclaim as a modern equal of the ancient epics, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (published in its final version in 1532) was for learned readers a perplexing work: it mixed romance, epic, and lyric poetry, poked fun at its marvelous and outmoded chivalric matter, contained many interrupted narrative threads, and included base and lowborn characters...read more

For today's readers, the great Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) can be startlingly relevant to the social and educational divisiveness we confront at century's end: here Giuseppe Mazzotta, one of the leading Italianists in the United States, shows how much Vico, properly read, can bring to an understanding of contemporary social problems. To explore Vico's body of thought in all its monumental complexity, Mazzotta highlights the place of poetry, or "writerliness," in Vico's educational project, which links literature, history, religion, philosophy, and politics. The New Map of the World is the first book since Benedetto Croce's The Philosophy of G. B. Vico (1911) to interpret the immense range of Vico's creativity.Beginning with Vico's autobiography, Mazzotta explains that Vico's heroic attempt to unite the arts and sciences was meant to offer a desperately needed political unity to modern society. In contrast to past thematic studies of Vico that focus on a single one of his ideas, The New Map of the World explores the vital interaction of the issues that fascinated him: his educational and political project, his sense of the necessity for a new way of conceiving authority, and his belief in the power of poetry. Mazzotta ends by examining Vico's awareness of the tragic limits of politics itself.Originally published in 1999.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Description: Contemporary with the Romantic generation, peer of Keats, Holderlin, and Goethe, and forerunner of Valéry and Pound, Ugo Foscolo is nevertheless little known outside Italy. In an endeavor to "discover" this exemplary European poet for English-speaking readers, and to "rediscover" him for Italian readers, Glauco Cambon examines both textually and contextually Foscolo's major works and their inextricable connection with his life, his philosophy, and his aesthetic principles...read more

Product Description: In a masterly synthesis of historical and literary analysis, Giuseppe Mazzotta shows how medieval knowledge systems--the cycle of the liberal arts, ethics, politics, and theology--interacted with poetry and elevated the Divine Comedy to a central position in shaping all other forms of discursive knowledge...read more

Product Description: This interdisciplinary volume interrogates bodily thinking in avant-garde texts from Spain and Italy during the early twentieth century and their relevance to larger modernist preoccupations with corporeality. It examines the innovative ways Spanish and Italian avant-gardists explored the body as a locus for various aesthetic and sociopolitical considerations and practices...read more

Product Description: In Dante and the Limits of the Law, Justin Steinberg offers the first comprehensive study of the legal structure essential to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Steinberg reveals how Dante imagines an afterlife dominated by sophisticated laws, hierarchical jurisdictions, and rationalized punishments and rewards...read more