The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel

Cover......Page 1
Half-title......Page 3
Title......Page 5
Copyright......Page 6
Dedication......Page 7
Contents......Page 9
Contributors......Page 11
Preface......Page 13
Acknowledgments......Page 15
Note on Translations......Page 16
Chronology of the Development of Italian Prose Fiction......Page 17
Resistance to theory......Page 23
The “questione della lingua”......Page 25
The disputed necessity of translations......Page 29
The tradition of the antinovel......Page 31
Belatedness of the theory......Page 32
Paradoxes of the canon......Page 35
In search of a public......Page 39
Further reading......Page 41
The fourteenth century......Page 42
The fifteenth century......Page 44
The sixteenth century......Page 47
The seventeenth century......Page 49
The eighteenth century......Page 56
Further reading......Page 63
The nineteenth-century historical novel......Page 64
The uniqueness of I promessi sposi......Page 65
I promessi sposi: theoretical questions, characters, plot, setting, and meaning......Page 68
Historical novels of the Risorgimento......Page 72
The past in the Italian novel......Page 75
The singularity of Il Gattopardo......Page 76
The continuation of the historical novel in contemporary literature......Page 78
Further reading......Page 82
Realism or verismo? Basic assumptions and related problems......Page 83
Realism and verisimilitude......Page 84
Literary conversions......Page 85
Narrators and narrative frames......Page 87
Popular realism and social Darwinism......Page 88
Impersonality......Page 90
Theoretical principles and writing practice......Page 92
Neglected or negligible novelists?......Page 93
Further reading......Page 96
5 Popular fiction between Italian Unification and World War I......Page 97
Further reading......Page 110
Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936)......Page 111
Italo Svevo (pseudonym of Ettore Schmitz, 1861–1928)......Page 116
Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893–1973)......Page 119
Further reading......Page 125
Origins, models, themes, language, and politics of neorealism......Page 126
Modes of neorealist narrative......Page 136
Further reading......Page 146
8 Memory and testimony in Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani......Page 147
Further reading......Page 157
9 The Italian novel in search of identity: history versus reality – Lampedusa and Pasolini......Page 158
Pier Paolo Pasolini......Page 171
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa......Page 172
10 Feminist writing in the twentieth century......Page 173
Further reading......Page 188
11 Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco: postmodern masters......Page 190
Further reading......Page 203
12 Literary cineastes: the Italian novel and the cinema......Page 204
Further reading......Page 218
13 Frontier, exile, and migration in the contemporary Italian novel......Page 219
Further reading......Page 234
14 The new Italian novel......Page 236
New women writers......Page 243
New voices of Italian fiction......Page 245
Italian mystery writing......Page 248
Further reading......Page 253
INDEX......Page 255