Italian Studies: Key Resources

In this book Moevs offers the first sustained treatment of the metaphysical picture that grounds and motivates the Comedy, and the relation between those metaphysics and Dante's poetics.

Leading scholar Albert Russell Ascoli traces the metamorphosis of Dante Alighieri - minor Florentine aristocrat, political activist and exile, amateur philosopher and theologian, and daring experimental poet - into Dante, author of the Divine Comedy and perhaps the most self-consciously 'authoritative' cultural figure in the Western canon. The text offers a comprehensive introduction to Dante's evolving, transformative relationship to medieval ideas of authorship and authority from the early Vita Nuova through the unfinished treatises, The Banquet and On Vernacular Eloquence, to the works of his maturity, Monarchy and the Divine Comedy. Ascoli reveals how Dante anticipates modern notions of personalized, creative authorship and the phenomenon of 'Renaissance self-fashioning'. Unusually, the book examines Dante's career as a whole offering an important point of access not only to the Dantean oeuvre, but also to the history and theory of authorship in the larger Italian and European tradition.

The story of a small Italian town where fishing, biking, and rock 'n' roll make the news, until tragedy turns everything upside down. Muglione. Nothing grows in this Tuscan backwater except the wild imagination of Fiorenzo, a nineteen-year-old metalhead. He lives for his garage band, horror movies, and fishing in the murky irrigation ditches outside of town. But when his path crosses with Mirko, the teenage cycling phenomenon, and Tiziana, the smart but frustrated head of the local youth center turned refuge for the town's hard-drinking seniors, his world will never be the same. From the brink of despair they fight their way back through honesty, resilience, and laughter, their fates interweaving in a story that is at once achingly funny, bitter, and full of poetic fervor. Told with the tenderness of a Fellini film, this contemporary novel continues the great tradition of Italian literature and cinema.