Pandemic and the Fairy Tale Narrative

The article considers how the narrative of the pandemic has been developed, especially with regard to literature. The case study analyzed is the Italian novel L’assemblea degli animali, written by an anonymous author, whose penname is Filelfo. The article shows that the wide range of classical, literary and artistic references recognizable inside the text corresponds to a precise attitude of the ecologist culture, which is in search for traditional and elevated models to assert their ethical and political objective. The novel brings this directory to the point that it evokes an esoteric dimension of ecology. The article states that this stance is not serious, but ends into a literary game and feeds the needs for entertainment by the cultural industry, rather than giving any real contribution to the ecological question.

РОЛЬ РОМАНИСТИКИ ПЬЕТРО КЬЯРИ В СТАНОВЛЕНИИ ИТАЛЬЯНСКОГО ЛИТЕРАТУРНОГО РОКОКО

This article explores a cultural significance of novel “La Filosofessa Italiana” written in 1753 Pietro Chiari and regarded the first Italian novel of early modern period. The objective of this research is to elucidate a formation of a new literary genre in Italian literature in XVIII century. In the following piece of research, the most outstanding European novels of XVIII century are examined in comparison with Pietro Chiari’s novel. In the following work we analyze the influence that exercised P. Marivaux, S. Richardson, F. Prévost and D. Default’s novels on the genesis of a new genre of Italian literary Rococo. In this article we investigate the details of the plot of “La Filosofessa Italiana” and explore the mental focus that was exposed by the first writer of Italian Rococo in this novel.

Struttura e narratore ne I Promessi Sposi di Alessandro Manzoni

In the early 19th century, the Italian literature did not have a mature novel, as is known today. The Italian novelist, Manzoni, and his masterpiece The Betrothed, set a solid basis for the contemporary Italian novel; thanks to its’ narrative characteristics that helped the novelist in achieving different reformative goals, woven stupendously with fictional, historical and realistic threads. The main purpose of this study is to apply an analytical and thematic approach on the structure and narrator of the novel. Furthermore, the research aims to distinguish the main artistic characteristics adopted from the European historical novel. The study then focuses on analyzing the function of the anonymous author’s fictional frame and how it created a diversity in the narrative levels. The research also highlights the importance of the omniscient narrator, the strong relations between the narrator and the narratee, the different narrative perspectives, and finally the polyphony: techniques that enhanced the realistic dimension of the novel.

Il romanzo digitale:

L’articolo propone una riflessione sullo stato dell’arte del romanzo italiano nel mondo digi- tale svolta attraverso l’analisi dei testi in prosa della modernità presenti nel portale Biblio- teca Italiana e affronta i casi di studio di Manzoni, Pirandello e Tozzi, per analizzare tre progetti complementari e diversi di edizione cartacea e digitale, e di interazione tra ricerca accademica, istituzioni bibliotecarie ed editoria. I casi mostrano come il romanzo, per la sua polifonia, le sue dinamiche genetiche, la sua contaminazione con le arti visive e drammati- che, richieda una infrastruttura digitale che metta in relazione tutti questi aspetti tra loro, anche in chiave didattica, costituendo un banco di prova della necessaria trasformazione dell’edizione critica digitale in un sito di ricerca e conoscenza dei testi e dei loro autori. This article proposes a reflection on the state of the art of the Italian novel in the digital world carried out through the analysis of modern prose texts in the website BibliotecaItaliana.it, examining the case studies of Manzoni, Pirandello, and Tozzi, and in particular three com- plementary projects and several digital editions as well as interactions among academic rese- arch, institutions, librarians, and publishers. The case studies show how the novel — thanks especially to its polyphony, its genetic dynamics and contamination with the visual and dra- matic arts — requires an infrastructure that also links all these aspects from an educational point of view. The novel may be considered as a testing ground for the necessary transforma- tion of the digital critical edition into a “knowledge site” of texts and their authors.

Adapting, Translating, and Reworking Gomorrah

This article seeks to find a balance between issues concerning adaptation and translation and issues of TV studies and film studies. Adapting a literary text for a movie or for a TV series within the same culture involves a plethora of interpretive, semiotic, and hermeneutic relationships. This case study of the Italian novel Gomorrah (2006) by Roberto Saviano considers diverse strategies of adaptation, illustrating the complex passage through different discourses, practices, and processes from Saviano’s novel to Matteo Garrone’s film (Gomorrah, 2008) and to the TV series (Gomorrah, 2014—on air). The analysis adopts a multidisciplinary methodology in order to draw attention to translational ‘continuities’ from one medium to another and to the differences and ‘discontinuities’ in transmedia reinterpretations of previous source materials.

Celebrity and Scandalous Fiction

This chapter studies scandalous fiction. One way of registering how scandal fiction might figure in a revised history of the novel is to consider scandal fiction as embodying everything that the polite novel sought to repudiate or disavow: criminality, sexuality, sensation, vulgarity, voyeurism, and reflexivity. For just as the novel genre itself is a scandal for much of the eighteenth century, the increasing respectability of the novel genre from the 1750s is predicated upon the move away from forms such as romans á clef and chroniques scandaleuses. Indeed, the English novel starts to define itself as a national genre against the scandalous excesses of the French or Italian novel—which it often does while exploiting and purveying these foreign excesses. This is particularly the case with the most scandalous forms of fiction: pornography and erotic fiction.

Italy

This chapter focuses on the development of the Italian novel identified with the Arab Diaspora. Literature in Italian by Arab writers is associated with the large-scale immigration from outside the European Union that the country began to experience in the late 1970s. As distinct from the traditions of Anglophone and Francophone literature, the notion of Italophone literature has acquired little currency, despite the focus of the definition of “migration literature in Italian” on the common language of writing. This chapter explores the reasons for this, and looks at the works of some Maghrebi and Middle Eastern male writers who have successfully explored the novel as a form in recent Italian literature. It also considers the role of language as a point of entry of Arabic culture into the Italian novel, along with the distinctive contribution of novels by Arab women writers.