Cesare Pavese And Anthony Chiuminatto

Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) is generally recognized as one of the most important writers of his period. Between the years 1929 and 1933, Pavese enjoyed a rich correspondence with his Italian American friend, the musician and educator Antonio Chiuminatto (1904-1973). The nature of this correspondence is primarily related to Pavese's thirst to learn about American culture, its latest books, its most significant contemporary writers, as well as its slang. This volume presents an annotated edition of Pavese and Chiminatto's complete epistolary exchange. Mark Pietralunga's brilliant introduction provides historical and cultural context for the letters and traces Pavese's early development as a leading Americanist and translator. The volume also includes an appendix of Chiuminatto's detailed annotations and thorough explanations of colloquial American terms and slang, drawn from the works of Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and William Faulkner. A lively and illuminating exchange, this collection ultimately corroborates critical opinion that America was the igniting spark of Pavese's literary beginnings as a writer and translator.

This book explores Kafka's sometimes surprising connections with key Italian writers, from Italo Calvino to Elena Ferrante, who shaped Italy's modern literary landscape.

What do Cesare Pavese, Beppe Fenoglio and Primo Levi have in common? Apart from their obvious Piedmontese origins, they and other writers coming from this Italian region share a certain tendency towards multilingualism, which is a characteristic that has not been comprehensively investigated over the years. This study presents a linguistic analysis of a group of modern and contemporary narratives written by Piedmontese authors. The novels and short stories here examined are notable for the intriguing way in which they move between a variety of idioms – Standard Italian, regional vernaculars, English and pastiches (with rare excursions into French). With the support of linguistic and philosophical theories on the relation between identity, alterity and language, the book demonstrates how the use of non-standard parlances is fundamental in both reinforcing the sense of belonging to specific social groups and highlighting the presence of dissimilar identities and ‘other’ cultures. A sociolinguistic study and an analysis of the political and historical context of the region are also provided in order to illustrate how the combination of different varieties in literature reflects the region’s peripheral position, as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in Piedmont since the nineteenth century. This book fills a notable gap, and casts new light on Piedmontese literature.

"This study gauges the effects that Walt Whitman's poetry had in Italy in the period from 1870 to 1945: the reactions it provoked, the aesthetic and political agendas it came to sponsor, and the creative responses it facilitated. But it also investigates the contexts and causes of Whitman's success abroad, in the lives, backgrounds, beliefs, and imaginations of the people who encountered it. Ultimately, it chronicles the evolution of a literature intent on regenerating itself and moving toward modernity. Bernardini gives particular attention to women writers and noncanonical writers often excluded from previous discussions of Whitman's Italian reception. The book is grounded in archival studies and examination of primary documents, which led to a series of noteworthy discoveries. While the main focus is on the Italian literary scene, the history of the reception retraced here is constantly evaluated in relation to other cultures that were also intent, in those same years, on reading and recreating Whitman. Studying Whitman's reception from a transnational perspective shows how many countries were simultaneously carving out a new modernity in literature and culture. In this sense, Bernardini not only shows the interconnectedness of various international agents in understanding and contributing to the spread of Whitman's work, but, more largely, a constellation of similar pre-modernist and modernist sensibilities. This stands in contrast to the notion of sudden innovation: modernity was not easy to achieve, and most of all, it did not imply a complete refusal of tradition. Instead, a continuous and fruitful negotiation between tradition and innovation, and not a sudden break with the literary past, is at the very heart of the Italian and transnational reception of Whitman"--

When America began to emerge as a world power at the end of the nineteenth century, Italy was a young nation, recently unified. The technological advances brought about by electricity and the combustion engine were vastly speeding up the capacity of news, ideas, and artefacts to travel internationally. Furthermore, improved literacy and social reforms had produced an Italian working class with increased time, money, and education. At the turn of the century, if Italy's ruling elite continued the tradition of viewing Paris as a model of sophistication and good taste, millions of lowly-educated Italians began to dream of America, and many bought a transatlantic ticket to migrate there. By the 1920s, Italians were encountering America through Hollywood films and, thanks to illustrated magazines, they were mesmerised by the sight of Manhattan's futuristic skyline and by news of American lifestyle. The USA offered a model of modernity which flouted national borders and spoke to all. It could be snubbed, adored, or transformed for one's personal use, but it could not be ignored. Perversely, Italy was by then in the hands of a totalitarian dictatorship, Mussolini's Fascism. What were the effects of the nationalistic policies and campaigns aimed at protecting Italians from this supposedly pernicious foreign influence? What did Mussolini think of America? Why were jazz, American literature, and comics so popular, even as the USA became Italy's political enemy? America in Italian Culture provides a scholarly and captivating narrative of this epochal shift in Italian culture.