Featured Resources
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics by
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a comprehensive reference work dealing with all aspects of its subject: history, types, movements, prosody, and critical terminology. Prepared by recognized authorities, its articles treat their topics in sufficient depth and with enough lucidity to satisfy the scholar and the general reader alike. Entries vary in length from relatively brief notices to substantial articles of about 20,000 words. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, published in 1965, established itself as a standard work in the field. Among the 215 contributors were Northrop Frye writing on allegory, Murray Krieger on belief in poetry, Philip Wheelwright on myth, John Hollander on music, and William Carlos Williams on free verse. In 1974, the Enlarged Edition increased the entries with dozens of new subjects, including rock lyric, computer poetry, and black poetry, to name just a few. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics accounts for the extraordinary change and explosion of knowledge within literary and cultural studies since the 1970s. This edition, completely revised, preserves what was most valuable from previous editions, while subjecting each existing entry to revision. Over 90 percent of the entries have been extensively revised and most major ones entirely rewritten. Completely new entries number 162, including those by new contributors Camille Paglia, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Elaine Showalter, Houston Baker, Andrew Ross, and many more. New entries include those on cultural criticism, discourse, feminist poetics, and Chicano poetry. Improvements cover several areas: All the recent developments in theory that bear on poetry are included; bibliographies of secondary sources are extended; cross-references among entries and through blind entries have been expanded for greater ease of use; and coverage of emergent and non-Western poetries is dramatically increased. Indeed, a hallmark of the encyclopedia is its world-wide orientation on the poetry of national and cultural groups.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 1993
The Cambridge History of Italian Literature by
Italy possesses one of the richest and most influential literatures of Europe, stretching back to the thirteenth century. This substantial history of Italian literature provides a comprehensive survey of Italian writing since its earliest origins. Leading scholars describe and assess the work of writers who have contributed to the Italian literary tradition, including Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, the Renaissance humanists, Machiavelli, Ariosto and Tasso, pioneers and practitioners of commedia dell'arte and opera, and the contemporary novelists Calvino and Eco. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature sets out to be accessible to the general reader as well as to students and scholars: translations are provided, along with a map, chronological chart and substantial bibliographies.
Location: Mugar Memorial Library Reference X (PQ4038 .C35 1999 )Publication Date: 1999
Guides to Italian Literature
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Dizionario delle opere della letteratura italiana by Location: Mugar Memorial Library Reference X (PQ4006 .D49 2006 )Publication Date: 2006
The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel by
The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel provides a broad ranging introduction to the major trends in the development of the Italian novel from its early modern origin to the contemporary era. Contributions cover a wide range of topics including the theory of the novel in Italy, the historical novel, realism, modernism, postmodernism, neorealism, and film and the novel. The contributors are distinguished scholars from the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, and Australia. Novelists examined include some of the most influential and important of the twentieth century inside and outside Italy: Luigi Pirandello, Primo Levi, Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino.
Location: Mugar Memorial Library Stacks (PQ4170 .C36 2003 ) and OnlinePublication Date: 2003
Voices of Italian America by
Voices of Italian America presents the first authoritative study and anthology of the largely Italian-language literature written and published in the U.S. from the heydays of the Great Migration (1880-1920) to the almost definitive demise of the cultural world of the first generation soon before and after WWII. The volume resurrects the neglected and even forgotten territory of a nation-wide "Little Italy" where people wrote, talked, read, and consumed the various forms of entertainment mostly in their native Italian language, in a complex interplay with native dialects and surrounding American English. In the anthological sections we read, among others, excerpts from the ethnically-tinged thrillers by Tuscan-born first-comer Bernardino Ciambelli, as well as the first short-stories by Italian American women, set in the Gilded Age. The fiction of political activists such as Carlo Tresca coexists with the hard-boiled autobiography of Italian American cop Mike Fiaschetti, fighting against the Mafia. Voices presents new material by English-speaking classics such as Pietro di Donato and John Fante, and a selection of poetry by a great bilingual voice, the champion of the masses and IWW poet Arturo Giovannitti, and by a lesser-known, self-taught, satirical versifier, Riccardo Cordiferro/Ironheart. Controversial documents on the difficult interracial relations between Italian - and African Americans live side by side with the first poignant chronicles from Ellis Island.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2011
The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature by
Embracing the whole of Italian literature, from the early thirteenth century to the present, The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature takes a broad view of what constitutes literature, covering historical writing, travel writing, theatre, and philosophy as well as the novel, poetry, literary dialogues, and critical theory. Providing generous coverage of canonical figures - from Dante and Petrarch to Montale and Calvino - it also contains a wealth of short entries on significant minor figures. The Companion also explores Latin literature written by Italian authors - a major feature of Renaissance culture - and Italian dialect literature; and highlights articles which place the writers and their works in their wider social, historical, artistic, and political context.
Location: Mugar Memorial Library Reference X (PQ4006 .O84 2002 )Publication Date: 2003
Text Collections
Italian Language
- BADIP - database of spoken Italian BADIP is a free access website of the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz (Austria) that publishes corpora for the analysis and the study of spoken Italian.
- Opera del Vocabolario Italiano Textual database that contains 1960 vernacular texts (22.3 million words, 456,000 unique forms) the majority of which are dated prior to 1375, the year of Boccaccio's death. The verse and prose works include early masters of Italian literature like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as lesser-known and obscure texts by poets, merchants, and medieval chroniclers.
Italian Literature
- Duecento: la poesia italiana dalle origini a Dante Fulltext archive of Italian poetry from its beginnings thru the time of Dante
- Italian Women Writers The Italian Women Writers project (IWW) is a long-term research endeavor to preserve and provide access to an extensive corpus of literature written by Italian women authors. The goal is to bring information on and texts by both famous and previously neglected Italian women writers to a wider audience of students, scholars, teachers, and the general public, and to preserve these often fragile texts for generations to come.
- Italian Dialect Poetry Collection of Italian dialect poetry organized by poet name and region
Finding Articles
- BU Libraries Search This link opens in a new window BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of research material provided by the library. Resources covered by the search includes books and eBooks, journals, scores and sheet music, video and audio recordings, and other physical and electronic items held by the library. Coverage encompasses materials relating to the prehistoric and antique world through to the present.
- Literature Online This link opens in a new window LION includes texts, criticism, and reference material, including thousands of literary articles, essays, biographies and encyclopedia entries on over 350,000 works of poetry, prose, and drama from the 8th to the 21st century.
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window Indexes critical materials on literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore. Includes citations from worldwide publications: periodicals, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations and bibliographies.
- Literature Criticism Online This link opens in a new window Contains critical and biographical essays on authors currently living or who died after Jan. 1, 2000. May be searched simultaneously with Contemporary Authors and the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window This database provides full text access to the back issues of core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Book reviews are included as well as journal articles. Abstracts are available for some of the articles.
- Project Muse This link opens in a new window Project Muse provides digital access to scholarly journals and books in the humanities and social sciences. The scholarly content comes from non-profit scholarly publishers, including university presses and societies. The full text resources include journal articles, book reviews and book chapters.
- Linguistics Collection This link opens in a new window The Linguistics Collection is comprised of index and full-text databases covering all aspects of the study of language including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The collection includes the Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA), which abstracts and indexes the international literature in linguistics and related disciplines in the language sciences. And Linguistics Database, which includes full-text journals and other sources in linguistics including many titles indexed in LLBA.
Literary Biography
- Contemporary Authors This link opens in a new window A bio-bibliographical guide to current writers in fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, journalism, drama, motion pictures, television, and other fields.
- Literature Online This link opens in a new window LION includes texts, criticism, and reference material, including thousands of literary articles, essays, biographies and encyclopedia entries on over 350,000 works of poetry, prose, and drama from the 8th to the 21st century.
- Dizionario biografico degli Italiani This link opens in a new window Biographical dictionary of Italians who have contributed to the artistic, historic, political, scientific, religious, literary, and economic life of Italy from the fall of the Roman Empire to the present.
- Dizionario autori italiani contemporaneiLocation: Mugar Memorial Library Reference X (PQ4057 .D58 2006 )Publication Date: 2006
Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, 2a ed. by Location: Mugar Memorial Library Stacks (PQ4057 .D59 1986 )Publication Date: 1986
Dante: a brief history by
For over seven centuries, Dante and his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, have held a special place in Western culture. The poem is at once a vivid journey through hell to heaven, a poignant love story, and a picture of humanity's relationship to God. It is so richly imaginative that a first reading can be bewildering. In response, Peter Hawkins has written an inspiring introduction to the poet, his greatest work, and its abiding influence. His knowledge of Dante and enthusiasm for his vision make him an expert guide for the willing reader.
Location: Mugar Memorial Library Stacks (PQ4335 .H39 2006 )Publication Date: 2006
Primo Levi: bridges of knowledge by
"I always thought that [building] bridges is the best job there is because roads go over bridges, and without roads we'd still be like savages. In short, bridges are like the opposite of borders, and borders are where wars start." --Primo Levi, 'La chiave a stella' (The Wrench) Primo Levi (1919-1987) was one of Italy's most distinguished writers. A survivor of the Holocaust, his memoirs on the Nazi death camps (If This Is a Man and The Truce) are internationally recognised as among the most powerful and profound testimonies to have come out of the extermination of the European Jewry. This book is the first comprehensive introduction to Levi and his writing for English-speaking readers. The author draws attention to the literary worth of Levi's entire output -- not just the Holocaust testimonies for which he is primarily known -- and situates his works in the context of Italian culture and society from the 1920s to the 1980s. A man with many identities -- chemist, industrial manager and writer -- he tried, through his writing, to build bridges between different cultures and fields of enquiry. General readers who are acquainted with Levi's writings will find this book fascinating, as will students and scholars of Holocaust Literature, Italian Studies and Contemporary Italian Literature.
Location: Mugar Memorial Library Stacks (PQ4872.E8 Z58 1995 )Publication Date: 1995
Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present by
A collection of essays providing feminist interpretations of Italian women's literary and cinematic production over the centuries.
Location: Mugar Memorial Library Stacks (PQ4063 .I885 1996 )Publication Date: 1996
