Related Guides
About This Guide
This Research Guide will help you find Italian language and literature resources available thru the BU Libraries. Here you will find information on:
- Language resources - dictionaries and grammar books
- Background information - guides, encyclopedias, biographies
- Open Access resources including websites and digital collections
- Italian related programs at Boston University
New Books -- Recent Acquisitions
The Pomegranates and Other Modern Italian Fairy Tales by
A collection of magical Italian folk and fairy tales--most in English for the first time The Pomegranates and Other Modern Italian Fairy Tales presents twenty magical stories published between 1875 and 1914, following Italy's political unification. In those decades of political and social change, folklorists collected fairy tales from many regions of the country while influential writers invented original narratives in standard Italian, drawing on traditional tales in local dialects, and translated others from France. This collection features a range of these entertaining jewels from such authors as Carlo Collodi, most celebrated for the novel Pinocchio, and Domenico Comparetti, regarded as the Italian Grimm, to Grazia Deledda, the only Italian woman to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature. With one exception, all of these tales are appearing in English for the first time. The stories in this volume are linked by themes of metamorphosis: a man turns into a lion, a dove, and an ant; a handsome youth emerges from a pig's body; and three lovely women rise out of the rinds of pomegranates. There are also more introspective transformations: a self-absorbed princess learns about manners, a melancholy prince finds joy again, and a complacent young woman discovers gratitude. Cristina Mazzoni provides a comprehensive introduction that situates the tales in their cultural and historical context. The collection also includes period illustrations and biographical notes about the authors. Filled with adventures, supernatural and fantastic events, and brave and flawed protagonists, The Pomegranates and Other Modern Italian Fairy Tales will delight, surprise, and astonish.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2021
Italian Industrial Literature and Film: Perspectives on the Representation of Postwar Labor by
This book explores the representation of industrial labor in Italian literature and film from the 1950s through the 1970s. The essays in this book offer a comprehensive panorama of this generation's work, examining key questions and texts, set against the context of history and theory, gender and class, geography and the environment, as well as their precursors and present-day successors.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2021
Food and Women in Italian Literature, Culture and Society by
This book explores how women's relationship with food has been represented in Italian literature, cinema, scientific writings and other forms of cultural expression from the 19th century to the present.Italian women have often been portrayed cooking and serving meals to others, while denying themselves the pleasure of the table. The collection presents a comprehensive understanding of the symbolic meanings associated with food and of the way these intersect with Italian women's socio-cultural history and the feminist movement.From case studies on Sophia Loren and Elena Ferrante, to analyses of cookbooks by Italian chefs, each chapter examines the unique contribution Italian culture has made to perceiving and portraying women in a specific relation to food, addressing issues of gender, identity and politics of the body.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2020
Italian Literature since 1900 in English Translation by
Providing the most complete record possible of texts by Italian writers active after 1900, this annotated bibliography covers over 4,800 distinct editions of writings by some 1,700 Italian authors. Many entries are accompanied by useful notes that provide information on the authors, works, translators, and the reception of the translations. This book includes the works of Pirandello, Calvino, Eco, and more recently, Andrea Camilleri and Valerio Manfredi. Together with Robin Healey’s Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation, also published by University of Toronto Press in 2011, this volume makes comprehensive information on translations from Italian accessible for schools, libraries, and those interested in comparative literature.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2019
The Novel of Ferrara by
Among the masters of twentieth-century literature, Giorgio Bassani and his Northern Italian hometown of Ferrara "are as inseparable as James Joyce and Dublin or Italo Svevo and Trieste" (from the Introduction). Now published in English for the first time as the unified masterwork Bassani intended, The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani's six classics, fully revised by the author at the end of his life: Within the Walls, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Behind the Door, The Heron, and The Smell of Hay.Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after the Second World War, these interlocking stories present a fully rounded world of unforgettable characters: the respected doctor whose homosexuality is tolerated until he is humiliatingly exposed by an exploitative youth; a survivor of the Nazi death camps whose neighbors' celebration of his return gradually turns to ostracism; a young man discovering the ugly, treacherous price that people will pay for a sense of belonging; the Jewish aristocrat whose social position has been erased; the indomitable schoolteacher, Celia Trotti, whose Communist idealism disturbs and challenges a postwar generation.The Novel of Ferrara memorializes not only the Ferrarese people, but the city itself, which assumes a character and a voice deeply inflected by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs. Suffused with new life by acclaimed translator and poet Jamie McKendrick, this seminal work seals Bassani's reputation as "a quietly insistent chronicler of our age's various menaces to liberty" (Jonathan Keates).
Call Number: Mugar Stacks PQ4807.A79 R613 2018Publication Date: 2018
Arms and the Woman: classical tradition and women writers in the Venetian Renaissance by
Arms and the Woman: Classical Tradition and Women Writers in the Venetian Renaissance by Francesca D'Alessandro Behr focuses on the classical reception in the works of female authors active in Venice during the Early Modern Age. Even in this relatively liberal city, women had restricted access to education and were subject to deep-seated cultural prejudices, but those who read and wrote were able, in part, to overcome those limitations. In this study, Behr explores the work of Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella and demonstrates how they used knowledge of texts by Virgil, Ovid, and Aristotle to systematically reanalyze the biased patterns apparent both in the romance epic genre and contemporary society. Whereas these classical texts were normally used to bolster the belief in female inferiority and the status quo, Fonte and Marinella used them to envision societies structured according to new, egalitarian ethics. Reflecting on the humanist representation of virtue, Fonte and Marinella insisted on the importance of peace, mercy, and education for women. These authors took up the theme of the equality of genders and participated in the Renaissance querelle des femmes, promoting women's capabilities and nature.
Call Number: Mugar Stacks PQ4063 .D35 2018Publication Date: 2018
Librarian
Barbara Maratos
Contact:
Boston University Libraries
bkmarato@bu.edu
bkmarato@bu.edu
Subjects: Language & Linguistics, Literature