Awards
- Winner of Winner, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies, Modern Language Association.
Overview
Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: A Poetics of the Bystander explores the overlooked position of the bystander in the Nuclear Age by focusing on the Italian situation as a paradigmatic case. Host to hundreds of American atomic weapons while lacking a nuclear arsenal of its own, Italy's status was an ambiguous one: that of an unwilling--and in many ways passive--accomplice. Inspired by Seamus Heaney's dictum that ""there is no such thing as innocent by-standing,"" the book frames Italy's fraught mix of implication and powerlessness not only as a geopolitical question, but as a way to rethink the role of the sidelined intellectual in the face of mass extinction. Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age includes discrete chapters on the major Italian intellectuals of the time: Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Leonardo Sciascia. Conscious of their own political marginalization, these authors address the atomic question through a wide range of experimental forms, approaching the nearly unthinkable theme in allusive and oblique ways. Often dismissed as disengaged, inconsistent, or merely playful, these works demand instead a political reading capable of recognizing their confrontation with the paradoxes of the nuclear age.
Full Product Details
Author: Maria Anna Mariani (Assistant Professor of Modern Italian Literature, University of Chicago)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 14.40cm
, Height: 2.00cm
, Length: 22.40cm
Weight: 0.420kg
ISBN: 9780192868855
ISBN 10: 0192868853
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 27 October 2022
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
"Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age. A Poetics of the Bystander is an important reading for scholars and students working in many fields of research,...The importance of the book lies in the way the author works around the notion of an ""implicated"" bystander in order to address an urgent topic- the nuclear anxiety. * Andrea Sartori, Annali d'Italianistica *"
Author Information
Maria Anna Mariani is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Primo Levi e Anna Frank. Tra testimonianza e letteratura (Carocci, 2018) and Sull'autobiografia contemporanea. Nathalie Sarraute, Elias Canetti, Alice Munro, Primo Levi (Carocci, 2012).
