Italian Cultural Lineages

Italian Cultural Lineages PDF Author: Jonathan White
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802094589
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Italian Cultural Lineages, Jonathan White seeks answers to the elusive questions: what is Italian culture and what is the Italian identity? By tracing Italian life and art through several themes – viewing and spectatorship, fantasy, passion, justice, reputation, and lifestyles – White offers new ways of perceiving an ancient cultural tradition in the twenty-first century. In doing so, he challenges readers to discern rich poetic seams that bind together his varied subject matter. Italian Cultural Lineages is primarily concerned with factors that unify Italians, however geographically dispersed they may be. Drawing on extensive archival and historical research, White shows how oftentimes Italian cultural traditions that appear to be extinct are, in fact, enduring – pushed out of the mainstream or submerged at some given point in history, only to re-surface and take on new meanings at a later date. Other, more marginal currents might disrupt and fragment Italian identity, politically and socially. However, White proposes that the challenge to Italy in these new and difficult lessons in tolerance has the potential to produce a much stronger culture, primed to welcome the marginal into an expanded spirit of all that counts as Italian. Ideally suited to course use, and written with great lucidity, Italian Cultural Lineages will prove fascinating to students, academics, and general readers alike.

Italian Cultural Lineages

Italian Cultural Lineages PDF Author: Jonathan White
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802094589
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Italian Cultural Lineages, Jonathan White seeks answers to the elusive questions: what is Italian culture and what is the Italian identity? By tracing Italian life and art through several themes – viewing and spectatorship, fantasy, passion, justice, reputation, and lifestyles – White offers new ways of perceiving an ancient cultural tradition in the twenty-first century. In doing so, he challenges readers to discern rich poetic seams that bind together his varied subject matter. Italian Cultural Lineages is primarily concerned with factors that unify Italians, however geographically dispersed they may be. Drawing on extensive archival and historical research, White shows how oftentimes Italian cultural traditions that appear to be extinct are, in fact, enduring – pushed out of the mainstream or submerged at some given point in history, only to re-surface and take on new meanings at a later date. Other, more marginal currents might disrupt and fragment Italian identity, politically and socially. However, White proposes that the challenge to Italy in these new and difficult lessons in tolerance has the potential to produce a much stronger culture, primed to welcome the marginal into an expanded spirit of all that counts as Italian. Ideally suited to course use, and written with great lucidity, Italian Cultural Lineages will prove fascinating to students, academics, and general readers alike.

Cultural Genealogy

Cultural Genealogy PDF Author: Raphael Falco
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317156552
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cultural Genealogy explores the popularization in the Renaissance of the still pervasive myth that later cultures are the hereditary descendants of ancient or older cultures. The core of this myth is the widespread belief that a numinous charismatic power can be passed down unchanged, and in concrete forms, from earlier eras. Raphael Falco shows that such a process of descent is an impossible illusion in a knowledge-based culture. Anachronistic adoption of past values can only occur when these values are adapted and assimilated to the target culture. Without such transcultural adaptation, ancient values would appear as alien artifacts rather than as eternal truths. Scholars have long acknowledged the Renaissance borrowings from classical antiquity, but most studies of translatio studii or translatio imperii tacitly accept the early modern myth that there was a genuine translation of Greek and Roman cultural values from the ancient world to the "modern." But as Falco demonstrates, this is patently not the case. The mastering of ancient languages and the rediscovery of lost texts has masked the fact that surprisingly little of ancient religious, ethical, or political ideology was retained — so little that it is crucial to ask why these myths of transcultural descent have not been recognized and interrogated. Through examples ranging from Petrarch to Columbus, Maffeo Vegio to the Habsburgs, Falco shows how the new techne of systematic genealogy facilitated the process of "remythicizing" the ancient authorities, utterly transforming Greek and Roman values and reforging them into the mold of contemporary needs. Chiefly a study of intellectual culture, Cultural Genealogy has ramifications reaching into all levels of society, both early modern and later.

Interpreting Italians

Interpreting Italians PDF Author: Jeffrey Bailey
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1784622877
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
“The primary goal of this volume is to help prepare foreign visitors for what awaits them, and to offer a deeper insight into a culture and way of life that has held so many millions in its thrall.” Interpreting Italians is a socio-cultural travel guide designed for people whose interest in Italy goes beyond the readymade impression or the hackneyed cliché. It is a serious effort to understand what the ‘Italian temperament’ actually is, how it came to be, and the impact it has had both on Italians themselves and on the outsiders who attempt to live intimately and knowledgeably among them. To this end, it offers a thoughtful interpretation of those aspects of Italian culture and history – furbiziaand bella figura, the piazza and the casa, the role of the mother, the extravagance of the Baroque and the personal as well as architectural significance of the façade – that have at once reflected and compounded Italians’ attitudes to foreigners and to each other by examining their approaches to love and sex, religion and politics, food and the family, language and bureaucracy, regionalism and immigration, sport and the Mafia. The book consists of eighteen concise but well-documented essays and five appendices that, in addition to an extensive reading list, provide practical suggestions to visitors relating to the preparation of menus and the selection of walking tours and excursions to sites often overlooked by the casual tourist.Interpreting Italians will be a useful aid to anyone truly curious about discovering what makes Italians tick.

A History of Italy

A History of Italy PDF Author: Claudia Baldoli
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137013664
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
Until the beginning of the 18th century, to be 'Italian' meant to identify with a number of collective memories, rather than a national memory. Yet there are elements of continuity that have shaped Italian identity over the past 1,500 years. Religion, food, art and architecture, a literary language, as well as a particular relationship between cities and countryside, between family and civil society have all contributed to present day Italian culture and politics. Baldoli explores the history of Italy as a country, rather than as a nation, in order to trace its fascinating cultural and political development. Offering a way into each period of Italian history, the book brings Italy's past to life with extracts from poetry, novels and music. Drawing on the latest research published in English and Italian, this is the ideal introduction for all those interested in Italy's cultural and social past and its significance for the country's present.

The Science of Naples

The Science of Naples PDF Author: Lorenza Gianfrancesco
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1800086733
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
Long neglected in the history of Renaissance and early modern Europe, in recent years scholars have revised received understanding of the political and economic significance of the city of Naples and its rich artistic, musical and political culture. Its importance in the history of science, however, has remained relatively unknown. The Science of Naples provides the first dedicated study of Neapolitan scientific culture in the English language. Drawing on contributions from leading experts in the field, this volume presents a series of studies that demonstrate Neapolitans’ manifold contributions to European scientific culture in the early modern period and considers the importance of the city, its institutions and surrounding territories for the production of new knowledge. Individual chapters demonstrate the extent to which Neapolitan scholars and academies contributed to debates within the Republic of Letters that continued until deep into the nineteenth century. They also show how studies of Neapolitan natural disasters yielded unique insights that contributed to the development of fields such as medicine and earth sciences. Taken together, these studies resituate the city of Naples as an integral part of an increasingly globalised scientific culture, and present a rich and engaging portrait of the individuals who lived, worked and made scientific knowledge there.

Postcolonial Italy

Postcolonial Italy PDF Author: Cristina Lombardi-Diop
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137281464
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume constitutes a multidisciplinary intervention into the emerging field of postcolonial studies in Italy, bringing together cultural and social history, critical and political theory, literary and cinematic analyses, ethnomusicology and cultural studies, anthropological fieldwork, and race, gender, diaspora, and urban studies.

Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries PDF Author: Michele Marrapodi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351925849
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 491

Get Book Here

Book Description
Applying recent developments in new historicism and cultural materialism - along with the new perspectives opened up by the current debate on intertextuality and the construction of the theatrical text - the essays collected here reconsider the pervasive influence of Italian culture, literature, and traditions on early modern English drama. The volume focuses strongly on Shakespeare but also includes contributions on Marston, Middleton, Ford, Brome, Aretino, and other early modern dramatists. The pervasive influence of Italian culture, literature, and traditions on the European Renaissance, it is argued here, offers a valuable opportunity to study the intertextual dynamics that contributed to the construction of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical canon. In the specific area of theatrical discourse, the drama of the early modern period is characterized by the systematic appropriation of a complex Italian iconology, exploited both as the origin of poetry and art and as the site of intrigue, vice, and political corruption. Focusing on the construction and the political implications of the dramatic text, this collection analyses early modern English drama within the context of three categories of cultural and ideological appropriation: the rewriting, remaking, and refashioning of the English theatrical tradition in its iconic, thematic, historical, and literary aspects.

The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism

The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism PDF Author: Paul Hamilton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191064971
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 865

Get Book Here

Book Description
TThe Oxford Handbook to European Romanticism brings together leading scholars in the field to examine the intellectual, literary, philosophical, and political elements of European Romanticism. The book focuses on the cultural history of the period extending from the French Revolution to the uprisings of 1848. It begins with a series of chapters examining key texts written by major writers in languages including: French; German; Italian; Spanish; Russian; Hungarian; Greek; and Polish amongst others. A second section then explores the naturally inter-disciplinary quality of Romanticism, exemplified by the different discourses with which writers of the time set up an internal, comparative dynamic. These chapters highlight the sense a discourse gives of being written knowledgeably against other pretenders to completeness or comprehensiveness of self-understanding of the time. Discourses typically advance their own claims to resume European culture, collaborating with and at the same time trying to assimilate each other in the process. The main examples featured here are: history; geography; drama; theology; language; philosophy; political theory; the sciences; and the media. Each chapter offers an original and individual interpretation of an inherently comparative world of individual writers and the discursive idioms to which they are historically subject. Together the forty-one chapters provide a comprehensive and provocative overview of European Romanticism.

British Literary Salons of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

British Literary Salons of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries PDF Author: S. Schmid
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137063742
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Get Book Here

Book Description
British salons, with guests such as Byron, Moore, and Thackeray, were veritable hothouses of political and cultural agitation. Using a number of sources - diaries, letters, silver-fork novels, satires, travel writing, Keepsakes, and imaginary conversations - Schmid paints a vivid picture of the British salon between the 1780s and the 1840s.

Three Plays of Maureen Hunter

Three Plays of Maureen Hunter PDF Author: Hunter, Maureen
Publisher: OIBooks-Libros
ISBN: 1896239994
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 944

Get Book Here

Book Description
Book is clean and tight. No writing in text. Like New