Product Description: By exposing the theory of romance to the romance of theory, Diane Elam explores literature’s most uncertain, least easily definable and most tenacious genre, assessing its implications for both feminism and the understanding of history...read more

"Romancing the Postmodern" exposes the theory of romance to the romance of theory, outlining the implications for feminism of literature's least easily definable genre. By re-aligning the two powerful genres of postmodernism and romance, Diane Elam highlights what is unique to postmodernism about the definition of history, and reintroduces the previously hidden figure of woman in the light of new gender definitions. Elam offers a new theoretical stance, reaching back to literature's greatest romantic novelists - Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad - and forward to the postmodern "romances" of Italo Calvino and Kathy Acker. In bringing together a range of feminist analyses of genre, culture and history, "Romancing the Postmodern" also highlights postmodernism's ability to disrupt received meanings and to re-read history through the agency of gender. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics of English literature and comparative literature, women's studies and cultural studies.

Product Description: The Mirage of America in Contemporary Italian Literature and Film explores the use of images associated with the United States in Italian novels and films released between the 1980s and the 2000s. In this study, Barbara Alfano looks at the ways in which the individuals portrayed in these works – and the intellectuals who created them – confront the cultural construct of the American myth...read more

Product Description: The mother-daughter relationship is a popular theme in contemporary Italian writing but has never before been analysed in a comprehensive book-length study. In Corporeal Bonds, Patrizia Sambuco analyses novels by authors such as Elsa Morante, Francesca Sanvitale, Mariateresa Di Lascia, and Elena Ferrante, each of which is narrated from the daughter’s point of view and depicts the daughter’s bond with the mother...read more

Product Description: The crime genre entered Italy in the late nineteenth century, and if initially Italian authors followed models developed abroad principally in the United States, England and France a uniquely Italian brand began to emerge soon. Il giallo, as the crime genre has been known in Italy since the 1930s, proved to be the ideal instrument to confront pressing and often uncomfortable issues which were pertinent to the Italian context: it became a useful tool to restore, symbolically at least, the truth and justice that were, and still are, perceived by a large part of the Italian reading public to be systematically denied in reality...read more

Product Description: ‘Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; - they are the life, the soul of reading’. So declared Laurence Sterne in his Tristram Shandy, the greatest of all monuments to digression. The modern Italian novel was not slow to pick up on Sterne’s lesson...read more

Product Description: Contemporary fantastic fiction, particularly that written by women, often challenges traditional literary practice. At the same time the predominantly male-authored canon of fantastic literature offers a problematic range of gender stereotypes for female authors to 're-write'...read more

Product Description: Detective fiction is a universally popular genre; stories about the investigation of a crime by a detective are published all over the world and in hundreds of languages. Detective fiction provides more than entertainment, however; it often has a great deal to say about crime and punishment, justice and injustice, testimony and judgment...read more

This book discusses issues of broad cultural consequence by examining the work of three of ItalyOs most prominent living novelists_Umberto Eco, Vincenzo Consolo, and Antonio Tabucchi. It uses an approach that is both historicist and psychoanalytic to address topics in cultural studies and Italian studies

Product Description: Situated at the crossroads of gender studies, narratology, and cultural studies, this book investigates the impact that the demographic and cultural revolutions of the last century have had on Italian women's life courses and on their literary imaginations...read more

Product Description: This book brings together the insights of historians and critics to examine the account given in a range of novels of the effect on peasant society of Fascist ruralist policies and the post-Second World War struggles for land reform...read more

Product Description: In the second half of the twentieth century, the Italian historical novel provided an unrivalled number of best sellers and publishing 'phenomena'. The success of the genre is closely related to a more general interest in revisiting the past in the light of a changed understanding of the nature, or philosophy, of history...read more

Product Description: Drawing on the recent renewal of interest in the debate on orality and literacy, this title investigates the varying perceptions and representations of orality in contemporary Italian fiction.

Product Description: With the Tangentopoli corruption scandals of the early 1990s, Italy is purported recently to have experienced a period of political change comparable to the period immediately following World War II. This latter being the socio-political environment in which the concept of impegno - political commitment - in literature became current, this volume asks whether an equivalent moment of constitutional crisis in the 1990s has had a comparable impact on perceptions of the role of the writer and of literature in Italian society...read more

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Product Description: "Plotting the Past stands out as a serious work marked by sharp analytical skills and an unusual breadth of subject matter encompassing questions of genre and ideology that are central to present-day critical discourses."-Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Italian "...read more

Product Description: As an international scholar and resident of Italy who has observed and shared the experiences of Italian women for the past twenty years, Alba Amoia has positioned herself perfectly to report to English-speaking audiences the great range and variety of writing produced by twentieth-century Italian women...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Carol Lazzaro-Weiss studies the fiction of twenty-five contemporary Italian women writers. Arguing for a notion of gender and genre, she runs counter to many Anglo-American and French feminist theorists who contend that traditional genres cannot readily serve as vehicles for feminist expression...read more

Product Description: Carol Lazzaro-Weiss studies the fiction of twenty-five contemporary Italian women writers. Arguing for a notion of gender and genre, she runs counter to many Anglo-American and French feminist theorists who contend that traditional genres cannot readily serve as vehicles for feminist expression...read more

Product Description: A study of the work of four of Italy's most highly acclaimed and influential contemporary writers: Italo Calvino, Leonardo Sciascia, Umberto Eco, and Luigi Malerba. It traces the features that mark these texts as postmodern and explores the question of indeterminacy.

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Product Description: Beautiful Fables: Self-consciousness in Italian Narrative from Manzoni to Calvino is the first full length study of literary self-consciousness in Italian narrative.