This article argues that Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Notturno conveys a conscious political and cultural message which is consequent of his long-lasting political commitment to the nation. This political value of the book has been mainly overlooked. Therefore, the first part of the article shows the locations of the political and war-related content, and how the book can be considered as a war diary. Moreover, the first part of the article relates the Notturno to d’Annunzio’s political project for the nation at the time when the book was composed (1915–1921). The aim of this part is to dispel the enduring critical misinterpretation of the Notturno as an intimate collection of memories and visions and to foreground its national value. The second part of the article addresses the roots of the Notturno’s political message from a literary point of view by relating it to the national commitment underlying d’Annunzio’s works since the 1880s. This commitment is based on the revalorization in the author’s literary works of the Italian national past, in particular of the 16th century, where d’Annunzio continues and renews the national storytelling of the Risorgimento.
This paper considers the dialectics between national decadence and regeneration in d'Annunzio's Il piacere. It argues that the novel's fin-de-siècle reception was conditioned by the author's prior classification as an immoral, anti-national writer in the wake of the poetry collection Intermezzo di rime. This classification determined a reading of d'Annunzio's debut novel in terms of decadence, while Il piacere itself actually pointed towards a literature of regeneration. The novel staged d'Annunzio's opposition to his own prior classification, while making claims for a more committed and more internationally relevant model of Italian literature in the context of European modernity.
This article confronts the theoretical tenets of reader-oriented short story collection theory and its implications for a literary analysis of Benni’s Il bar sotto il mare (1987) with the results of an empirical study of 12 readers. Through free recall tasks and open questions, we collected their recall of stories, specific passages, recurring topics and general interpretation to assess the processes of reticulation (i.e. searching for recurring elements in stories) and modification (i.e. modifying initial hypotheses based on the identification of new elements) advanced by Audet (2014). This confrontation revealed noticeably disagreeing results. Our findings suggest that flesh-and-blood readers adopt a more straightforward and intuitive approach when reading and interpreting collections as they are subject to a strong primacy effect, privilege personal appreciation of specific stories and passages, and rely on a disinclination to alter initial interpretative hypotheses. The findings pave the way for further investigation into the readers of SSCs.
This article analyzes two comic incidents portrayed in Gadda’s That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana and its adaptation The Facts of Murder by Pietro Germi. We argue that the inclusion of what we term ‘stereotypical gags’ in the detective novel functions as a modernist device that brings about a distancing of the audience and acts to distort the boundaries of genre. We show how the stereotypical gag both foregrounds and backgrounds the authorial humorous agency and results in satire and parody, respectively. In the first case, the authorial agency explicitly endorses humorous clichés and mocks along with the audience’s societal conventions. In the second case, humour generates a less obvious incongruity with respect to the discourse of the genre, resulting in parody through which the authorial agency mocks the audience and its trust in the values of the traditional detective story.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.