Giraffes in the Garden of Italian Literature
Subtitle: Modernist Embodiment in Italo Svevo, Federigo Tozzi and Carlo Emilio Gadda
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 186
ISBN-13: 9781351192637
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation; Italian literature; History and criticism; Modernism (Literature); Littérature italienne; Histoire et critique; Modernisme (Littérature)
Description: "Writing in 1926, Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) acknowledges his peculiarity within the Italian literary field by describing himself as a giraffe or a kangaroo in Italy's beautiful garden of literature. Gadda's self-characterization as exotic and even ungainly animal applies in equal measure to Italo Svevo (1861-1928) and Federigo Tozzi (1883-1920), authors who, like Gadda, thwarted efforts at critical classification. Yet the ostensible strangeness of these three Italian authors is diminished when their writing is considered within the framework of modernism, a label traditionally avoided by the Italian critical establishment. Indeed, within a modernism preoccupied with human embodiment, these Italian literary giraffes find their kin. Here, the central nexus of body, subjectivity and style that informs and binds the writing of Svevo, Tozzi and Gadda resonates with a modernist renegotiation and revalorization of a human body whose dignity and epistemological authority have been contested by social and technological modernity."
Table of contents: title: Chapter Introduction --; title: Three Giraffes in Italy's Literary Garden  -- Deborah Amberson; title: chapter 1 Corporeal Revolutions --; title: Interrogating Modern and Modernist Embodiment  -- Deborah Amberson; title: chapter 2 Corporeal Arrhythmia --; title: Svevo's Stylistics of Limping and Potentiality  -- Deborah Amberson; title: chapter 3 Blind Refusal --; title: Tozzi's Stylistic Phenomenology of Hypersensitivity  -- Deborah Amberson; title: chapter 4 Bodies, Borders and the Offended Self --; title: Gadda's Stylistic Ethics of Misogyny  -- Deborah Amberson; title: chapter Conclusion --; title: Italian Giraffes, Italian Bodies -- Deborah Amberson.