In literature in English, and in the popular imagination in English-speaking countries generally, the Minoan period is a kind of golden age, an Atlantis or Garden of Eden before the Fall. And, in such a construction, the Fall comes with the Mycenaeans, who are represented as a tough, militaristic people who destroyed Troy for trade reasons. This chapter traces the emergence of the idealistic depiction of the Minoans in response to the circumstances before, during, and after World War II. While some recent authors have begun to challenge the image of happy and peaceful Minoans, it suggests that the Minoans and Mycenaeans are still locked into antithetical perceptions that hinder real understanding of the cultures.
In Inghilterra l'affermazione del romanzo ebbe luogo in concomitanza con delle profonde trasformazioni politiche, sociali ed economiche che interessarono fortemente anche l'universo teatrale. Se il dramma della Restaurazione e del periodo georgiano è stato tuttavia oggetto di studi puntuali, intenti a ricostruire i contesti del genere e a individuare le sue componenti ideologiche, sociali e persino sessuali, la relazione tra le scene settecentesche e il novel è tuttora considerata un campo di ricerca secondario, riservato a studi specialistici e settoriali. L'analisi incrociata di tre romanzi di Frances Burney (1752-1840) (Evelina, 1778, Cecilia, 1782 e The Wanderer, 1814) e della commedia giovanile The Witlings (c. 1779) ci permette di ricordare come il radicato pregiudizio antiteatrale abbia spinto molti autori inglesi del Settecento a una teatralizzazione indiretta delle proprie opere, attraverso una complessa transmodalizzazione dei drammi coevi che riscopre l'innegabile co-testualità, tipica dell'epoca, tra i nuovi testi romanzeschi e la più consolidata tradizione drammatica.
open ; XIX ciclo ; . ; Letterature Di Lingua Inglese ; English Literature, American Literature, Second World War, Language of Politics, Propaganda ; open ; Porcelli, Stefania ; Porcelli, Stefania
My paradigms in this respect were Lady Anne Clifford and Alice Anne Thornton. They produced texts that have not even been mentioned or considered for centuries, but that have recently been partially rediscovered and appreciated by critics. My intent was to show how cultural factors and ideologies of the time influenced literary production, and to analyse the reasons that led these authors and their texts, first to oblivion, and later to recovery and canonization. When attempting to give a coherent answer to these questions, I kept in mind the background of Renaissance cultural memory and ideology, with particular regard to notions of femininity. Women writers are "mothers of the text", creators of new horizons, expert connoisseurs of the ideologies of their time, but also lonely, isolated, subjected women, ready to record their memories in voices that try to rise above a thousand other voices. ; The reasons that led women to overcome the injunction against cultural expression, including autobiography are one of the most relevant topics of my thesis. We know that many female characters were marginalized, if not made virtually invisible in many cultures and ideologies. That's why I tried to unveil the "counter" itinerary of women's writing from oblivion to canonization. ; English writers then began to deal with secular autobiography in the seventeenth century. Though excluded from the political scene and from public social life, Early-modern women writers seemed to be able to add something new and significant to the memorials and autobiographies of their own contemporary authors. When a woman wanted to be considered a member of a community whose experience was worthy of memory, she was confined by her own culture and family situation in the role of daughter, wife and mother, and she was seen almost exclusively as the subject of stories of religious experience, visions, trances, ecstasies. However, in the late seventeenth century, autobiography began to depart from an exclusively religious background and from the narrative account of the lives of men, and women began not only to record events related to male lives, but also to explore their identity and their own experiences in autobiographical form. Autobiography acquired the modern meaning of personal, introspective, secular writing, and, suddenly, the texts written by daughters, mothers and wives began to be recognized as real contributions to a genre in constant evolution. ; This doctoral thesis deals with the problem of canonisation and/or exclusion of women's writings from the literary canon of the English Renaissance. More broadly, it deals with issues of memory and cultural transmission. The first part of the thesis focuses on memory in different disciplines and on studies of memory in the contemporary critical arena. I tried to give an overview of the most recent progress in this field of study. The following chapters deal with issues of oblivion and recognition (up to the canonisation) of English women's writers in the Renaissance.
L'obiettivo di questa tesi è quello di analizzare la rappresentazione letteraria dei movimenti politici e delle sottoculture musicali in Italia e in Inghilterra. Mediante l'utilizzo degli strumenti concettuali elaborati dagli Studi culturali britannici e dalla Critical Theory, l'attenzione in questo lavoro è rivolta a quei romanzi la cui struttura cronologica articola al suo interno differenti temporalità, quella degli anni Settanta e quella del presente: da una parte questa strategia di lettura permette di investigare l'influsso del conflitto politico contemporaneo sulla formazione del sapere storico riguardante quel decennio e dall'altra essa consente di osservare la capacità delle sollevazioni passate di alimentare nel presente il mito della rivolta. Evidenziando il ruolo cruciale della narrazione in prima persona presente nei romanzi di Coe, Tassinari e King, in questa tesi si sottolinea la capacità della letteratura di finzione di dare voce alle soggettività subalterne: attraverso un paragone tra la figura del militante degli anni Settanta italiani e i coevi punk, skinhead e soulie inglesi, si ipotizza che la protesta politica e la rivolta sottoculturale siano stati due modi differenti di reagire alla crisi economica e sociale comune ai due paesi negli anni Settanta. Grazie ad esempi rintracciabili nelle rappresentazioni letterarie delle rivolte e delle rivoluzioni del passato o del Sud del mondo, nelle conclusioni di questo lavoro si riconosce alla letteratura la capacità di veicolare di generazione in generazione il mito della rivolta. ; This thesis aims at analysing the literary representation of political movements and subcultures in Italian and English contemporary literature. Using the hermeneutic tools elaborated by British Cultural Studies and Critical Theory, this work focuses on the novels which articulate in their chronological structure different temporalities, as the Seventies and the present: on the one hand this reading strategy allows to investigate the influence of the latter on the formation of historical knowledge and on the other hand it shows the effects of the myth of the former on the present. Underlining the crucial role of first-person narrative in Coe, King, and Tassinari's novels, this work highlights the capacity of fiction of giving voice to subaltern subjectivities: comparing the figures of the Italian militant of the Seventies to punks, skinheads and soulies of the Seventies in England, this thesis also suggests that political protest and subcultural revolt are two different ways of reacting to the economic and social crisis of the Seventies. Providing examples from literary representations of past revolutions and revolts, the conclusions of this work defines literature as an extremely useful instrument to convey in our day the spirit of revolt.
This is a completely new translation of Machiavelli's "The Prince" in a modern English that seeks to give the straightforward immediacy of the original; it comes complete with a long introduction describing the genesis of the original, its history in English editions and its influence on English literature. In particular it considers Machiavelli's interest in the psychology of leadership and the meshing of different personalities with different historical circumstances. There is also an extended analysis of translation problems related to the text with particular attention to those problems that arise from the text's extraordinary reputation. Various translations are analysed, showing how translators have been influenced by expectations of what Machiavelli said, sometimes ignoring what is actually written.
"This book is an enquiry into memory in the Western world. Specifically, memory is the framework of culture, because it links the present to the past--or tradition--and projects it into the future. For this reason, any work focusing on memory involves a double challenge: (1) to reveal the origin of concepts and (2) to glimpse the course of thoughts. This is the case of the present volume, in which the authors make several tastings of Europe's intellectual heritage, by taking into account both the Greek origin of this legacy and its relevance for understanding the European philosophical heritage. In particular, these papers focus on the Aristotelian tradition, the true keystone of Europe, and on other currents of thought that have also played an essential role in the intellectual evolution of the Old Continent. In the latter field, there are contributions, for instance, on philosophical-religious traditions such as Orphism or on certain fundamental aspects of Neoplatonism both in the Classical World and in Christian authors. The volume concludes with various works on the survival of these intellectual trends from the Renaissance to the present day. Consequently, this work offers the opportunity to delve deeper into some of the aspects that define Western civilisation, observed both from its origin and its evolution over the centuries. The volume contains papers in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and English."--
The Anglican schism, solemnized by the Act of Supremacy in 1534 emerged from the European Protestant Reformation that at its beginning was a movement of dissent against the Roman Church. It spread throughout Europe thanks to political and economic support of many princes who transformed it into State religion. Movement's success is strictly linked to the intention of individual States to claim their autonomy, unfettering themselves from external influences, such as the papacy, and thus creating State's territorial Churches. The Church of England's schism originates from this peculiar historical and religious scenario, and has its roots in a general process to claim sovereignty of the Kingdom against any external influence. Nevertheless, someone – especially English literature, still believes that the real reason behind Anglican schism is Pope Clement VII's refusal to declare null the marriage of Henry VIII with Catherine of Aragon and consequently preventing him from marrying Anne of Boleyn. We deemed it necessary a critical examination of the matter concerning the refusal to grant nullity to Henry VIII's marriage, in order to determine whether the underlying cause of the Act of Supremacy was a love story that turned out badly, or other more ordinary reasons. For this purpose, we have analysed an equally resounded, but lesser known trial. It regards the declaration of nullity of the marriage between Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, granted few decades earlier, as it represents a significant legal/matrimonial precedent of schismatic nature. We tried to evaluate the legal legitimacy, according to matrimonial canon law, in force at that time, to evaluate whether or not justice was done.
Laterza publishing house became one of the leading publishers in Italy between 1920 and 1945. Giovanni Laterza, its founder, in strict cooperation with Benedetto Croce, brought to Italy several foreign novels and philosophical essays. The idea lying behind this policy was to forge in the country a critical mass of ideal European readers, able to break the Italian cultural marginality and create new literary canons (Billani). We focus, in particular, on the policy of Laterza publishing house, and analyse how responses to the fascist ambiguous 'revision' system (Bonsaver, Forgacs, Rundle) changed depending on law, patronage, and material conditions in which the translators worked (Lefevere). After tracing a map of the whole corpus of foreign works (philosophical, historical and scientific) published by the Italian publisher, we focus on the five English literature translations issued during the regime (Milton's Aereopagitica; Huxley's The Olive Tree; Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson; Well's A Short History of the Word More's Utopia) ,in particular we will focus on Huxley's The Olive Tree translated in 1939 by Ada Prospero Gobetti, a unique collection of essays which combines ethics and politics. Analyzing the unpublished correspondence among the translators, Laterza and Croce, and through a close reading of Huxley's book and its translation we are able to identify both the policy of the publisher and the different translation strategies adopted, that reflect respectively submission or resistance to the dominant thinking (Tymoczko). This in turn allows us to discuss more in general the role of ideology as an explicit (censorship) or implicit (self-censorship) component of the translation process (Gramsci).
Since their arrival in Malta in 1800, the British tried to spread their own language in the country, but they faced not only considerable practical problems posed by the fact that they had to replace Italian with English as an official language, but also a series of varied ideological and linguistic reactions from part of the Maltese people. The Maltese society was immediately divided in the attitude towards English domination, and above all towards the insertion of the English language and the penetration of the Protestant missionaries. These soon became numerous and soon became aware that in order to give effect to their propaganda they could not use English: they turned to the local idiom, opposing the use of the Maltese, who wanted to benefit even the less cultured inhabitants, to the hegemonic language Italian-Catholicism Malta but was and it is strongly linked to the Catholic Church, and it was precisely in reaction to the aforementioned Protestant policy that the supporting faction of the Italian received new adepts and new vigor. In any case, religion was not the only strength of the Italian: the exiles of the Risorgimento in fact attracted the sympathies of several Maltese; some of them, during their stay in Malta, not only directed newspapers or collaborated, but also worked for the promotion of the study of Italian literature founding private schools, academies and reading cabinets, and moreover it is understood that in the Maltese literature the influences of Italian language, culture and literature were conspicuous, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, but still in the late 19th century ; N/A
