Modern Italian Literature

Preface and Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION: An Overview of Modern Italian Literature

PART I: The Long Eighteenth Century (1690-1815)

Chapter One: Cross-currents of modernity

1.1. This is Arcadia

1.2. New states, new thinkers

Chapter Two: Enlightenment and the public arena

2.1. Journalism, theatre and the book trade in Venice

2.2. Enlightenment and reform from Naples to Milan

Chapter Three: Literature and revolution

3.1. Italy and France

3.2. Alfieri: life and drama

3.3. Foscolo: between classicism and romanticism

PART II: Literature and Unification (1816-1900)

Chapter Four: Romantic Italy

4.1. Milan 1816

4.2. Florence 1827

4.3. Leopardi: the challenge of poetry

Chapter Five: Inventing the nation

5.1. Manzoni: the responsibility of the writer

5.2. History and fiction

5.3. Literature and the people

5.4. Memory, monuments and the national past

Chapter Six: Making the nation

6.1. The literary culture of Unificaton

6.2. The artist as observer: verismo and the social

6.3. Looking in: domesticity and the literary market

PART III: From modernism to the market (1900 to the present)

Chapter Seven: Modernism and the crisis of the literary subject

7. 1. The search for identity

7.2. War, technology and the arts

7.3. Narratives of selfhood: the subjective turn in fiction

Chapter Eight: Literature, Fascism and Anti-Fascism

8.1. Writing and the regime

8.2. The social condition of intellectuals

8.3. Testing the limits of the novel

8.4. Resistance, Reconstruction and Neo-realism

Chapter Nine: From the avant-garde to the market-place

9.1. The last avant-garde?

9.2. The widening of culture

9.3. A minimalist postmodernism: the poetics of attention

9.4. Epilogue: a weekend in April

Primary References

Secondary References

General Bibliography