A Tournament of Misfits

A Tournament of Misfits
Author: Aldo Palazzeschi
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2005-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442659041

Aldo Palazzeschi (1885-1974) is arguably the major twentieth-century Italian writer who has been most neglected by the English-speaking world. Born in Florence and trained as an actor, Palazzeschi ranks high as a poet and fiction writer in his homeland. His work, which attempts to recreate the experience of a spectator watching and listening to a character on stage, won him the praise of F.T. Marinetti, the founder of Italian futurism, who enrolled the young poet in his avant-garde coterie despite the fact that, stylistically, Palazzeschi's work had little in common with futurism. A Tournament of Misfits brings together a selection of Palazzeschi's short fiction for the first time in English. Through clear and fluid translations, Nicolas J. Perella demonstrates Palazzeschi's use of laughter to debunk social and literary myths. As a social being, Palazzeschi felt himself a deviant, but he was saved from a self-destructive bitterness by his capacity for irony, which he often directed at himself as well as at others. Yet, it would be a mistake not to see the desperate yearning for liberation from society’s rigid code behind the irony and the fun in Palazzeschi's work. With this translation, Perella brings Palazzeschi to life for a new audience to appreciate.

A Game of Noctis

A Game of Noctis
Author: Deva Fagan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2024-04-09
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1665930217

A thrilling middle grade fantasy about a girl who must participate in a deadly game with a ragtag team of players to save her grandfather from a terrible fate—perfect for fans of James Riley and Shannon Messenger! In the opulent, sinking city of Dantessa, the Great Game rules all. Pia Paro believes that so long as you follow the rules, you always have a chance at winning. But after her beloved Gramps is sentenced to a life of servitude, Pia accepts a dangerous offer and joins a team of players seeking to win the most perilous game of all: Noctis. The Seafoxes—Pia’s new teammates—are unlike anyone she’s ever met. There’s brash, bold Carlo; macabre Serafina; kindhearted Pasquale; and their dashing ringleader, Vittoria. Each has their own reason for playing, and soon, Pia begins to question all her long-held beliefs. Maybe the rules Pia once trusted to lift her up have only been keeping her—and thousands of others like her—down. As she struggles with these revelations, Pia must survive a gauntlet of clockwork soldiers, perilous underwater adventures, and even a game against Death herself. But with Pia’s grandfather’s life at stake, Pia must finally decide whether she’s brave enough to not just break the rules, but to change the very nature of the Game.

The Republic of Venice

The Republic of Venice
Author: Gasparo Contarini
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 1487505841

This book provides an alternative understanding to Machiavelli's Renaissance Italy.

Tuscan Spaces

Tuscan Spaces
Author: Silvia M. Ross
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2010-05-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442698926

An important locus for English-speaking writers, the region of Tuscany is also well represented in the Italian literary canon. In Tuscan Spaces, Silvia Ross focuses on constructions of Tuscany in twentieth-century Italian literature and juxtaposes them with English prose works by such authors as E.M. Forster and Frances Mayes to expose the complexity of literary representation centred on a single milieu. Ross uses the works of writers such as Federigo Tozzi, Aldo Palazzeschi, Vasco Pratolini, and Elena Gianini Belotti, to seek out alternative visions of Tuscan space and emphasizes that each author fashions the region in a manner which reflects their personal poetics, background, and experiences. Theories of cultural geography, space, travel, and narrative contribute to Ross's consideration of the dualisms commonly employed in writings about Tuscany, such as country/city, nature/culture, female/male, and self/other, all of which are in turn affected by her interrogation of the local/foreign opposition that underlies the study as a whole.

Geometry of the Passions

Geometry of the Passions
Author: Remo Bodei
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2018-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1487503369

The passions have long been condemned as a creator of disturbance and purveyor of the temporary loss of reason, but as Remo Bodei argues in Geometry of the Passions, we must abandon the perception that order and disorder are in a constant state of collision. By means of a theoretical and historical analysis, Bodei interprets the relationship between passion and reason as a conflict between two complementary logics. Geometry of the Passions investigates the paradoxical conflict-collaboration between passions and reason, and between individual and political projects. Tracing the roles passion and reason have played throughout history, including in the political agendas of Descartes, Hobbes, and the French Jacobins, Geometry of the Passions reveals how passion and reason may be used as a vehicle for affirmation rather than self-enslavement.

2018

2018
Author: Günter Berghaus
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 552
Release: 2018-04-09
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3110575361

The eighth volume of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies is again an open issue and presents in its first section new research into the international impact of Futurism on artists and artistic movements in France, Great Britain, Hungary and Sweden. This is followed by a study that investigates a variety of Futurist inspired developments in architecture, and an essay that demonstrates that the Futurist heritage was far from forgotten after the Second World War. These papers show how a wealth of connections linked Futurism with Archigram, Metabolism, Archizoom and Deconstructivism, as well as the Nuclear Art movement, Spatialism, Environmental Art, Neon Art, Kinetic Art and many other trends of the 1960s and 70s. The second section focuses on Futurism and Science and contains a number of papers that were first presented atthe fifth bi-annual conference of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM), held on 1–3 June 2016 in Rennes. They investigate the impact of science on Futurist aesthetics and the Futurist quest for a new perception and rational understanding of the world, as well as the movement’s connection with the esoteric domain, especially in the field of theosophy, the Hermetic tradition, Gnostic mysticism and a whole phalanx of Spiritualist beliefs. The Archive section offers a survey of collections and archives in Northern Italy that are concerned with Futurist ceramics, and a report on the Fondazione Primo Conti in Fiesole, established in April 1980 as a museum, library and archive devoted to the documentation of the international avant-garde, and to Italian Futurism in particular. A review section dedicated to exhibitions, conferences and publications is followed by an annual bibliography of international Futurism studies, exhibition catalogues, special issues of periodicals and new editions.

Those Who from Afar Look Like Flies

Those Who from Afar Look Like Flies
Author: Luigi Ballerini
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 1949
Release: 2017-08-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442625155

Those Who from Afar Look Like Flies is an anthology of poems and essays that aims to provide an organic profile of the evolution of Italian poetry after World War II. Beginning with the birth of Officina and Il Verri, and culminating with the crisis of the mid-seventies, this tome features works by such poets as Pasolini, Pagliarani, Rosselli, Sanguineti and Zanzotto, as well as such forerunners as Villa and Cacciatore. Each section of this anthology, organized chronologically, is preceded by an introductory note and documents every stylistic or substantial change in the poetics of a group or individual. For each poet, critic, and translator a short biography and bibliography is also provided.

The Criminal Crowd and Other Writings on Mass Society

The Criminal Crowd and Other Writings on Mass Society
Author: Scipio Sighele
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2018-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1487503180

The Criminal Crowd and Other Writings on Mass Society is the first collection in English of writings by Italian jurist, sociologist, and cultural and literary critic Scipio Sighele (1868-1913). In post-unification Italy and internationally Sighele was an important figure in contemporary debates on such issues as popular unrest, the problematic borders between individual and collective accountability, the role of urbanization in the development of criminality, and the emancipation of women. This volume draws an intricate portrait of a provocative thinker and public intellectual caught between tradition and modernity in fin de si?cle Europe. It features new English translations of Sighele's seminal work, The Criminal Crowd, along with a selection of his later studies on criminality and on individual and group behaviour. Nicoletta Pireddu's introduction and annotation provide valuable context and insights on Sighele's contribution to the emerging field of collective psychology, on his relationships with his predecessors Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Ferri and with his French rivals Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde, and on the significant scientific, literary, and cultural developments of his time.

The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2019-03-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0141985623

'Rich. . . eclectic. . . a feast' Telegraph This landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, from the birth of the modern nation to the end of the twentieth century. Poets, journalists, visual artists, musicians, editors, critics, teachers, scientists, politicians, translators: the writers that inhabit these pages represent a dynamic cross section of Italian society, their powerful voices resonating through regional landscapes, private passions and dramatic political events. This wide-ranging selection curated by Jhumpa Lahiri includes well known authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante and Luigi Pirandello alongside many captivating new discoveries. More than a third of the stories featured in this volume have been translated into English for the first time, several of them by Lahiri herself.

Five Comedies

Five Comedies
Author: Carlo Goldoni
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2016-01-01
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1442650281

The new house -- The coffee house -- Off to the country -- Adventures in the country -- Back from the country