NOVECENTO AND THE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD Emanuele Occhipinti, Drew University, and Jacob Blakesley, University of Leeds

1. Narrative and Theatre Some interesting studies focus on regional theatre: Cristiana Anna Addesso, Vincenzo Caputo, and Pasquale Sabbatino, I volti di Partenope: la drammaturgia napoletana del Novecento da Bracco a De Simone, Rome, Aracne, 116pp., examines different generations of Neapolitan playwrights. Of particular interest is the essay on Roberto De Simone on the re-elaboration of Lo cunto de li cunti by Basile in his La gatta Cenerentola. Mariagabriella Cambiaghi, Il caffè del Teatro Manzoni: autori e scena a Milano tra Otto e Novecento, Milan, Mimesis, 155 pp., investigates common traits of plays by Gerolamo Rovetta, Marco Praga, Giannino Traversi, and Sabatino Lopez, who contributed to the prestige of the Manzoni Theatre at the beginning of the 20th century. C. uses reviews, letters and newspapers as a sources, as the theatre archives were destroyed in 1943. Angela Felice and Paolo Patui, Il teatro friulano. Microstoria di un repertorio tra Otto e Novecento, Udine, Forum, 247 pp., explores the history of plays in Friulan dialect from 1866 to the second half of the 20th century. Alberto Bentoglio, Milano, 1948: un convegno per il teatro: documenti, riflessioni e polemiche, Florence, Le Lettere, 161 pp., collects the proceedings of the National Theatre Conference held in Milan in June 1948. Reflections, themes and fears on the theatre situation of those years are still of a compelling modernity and importance from a historic and critical point of view. Norma Bouchard and Valerio Ferme, Italy and the Mediterranean: Words, Sounds, and Images of the Post-Cold War Era, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 330 pp., analyses the link between Italy and its Mediterranean identity from an interdisciplinary point of view, and the country’s cultural and intellectual transformation since the 1980s. La scienza del teatro: omaggio a Dario Fo e Franca Rame. Atti della giornata di studi: Università di Verona, 16 maggio 2011, ed. Rosanna Brusegan, Rome, Bulzoni, 202 pp. collects the proceedings of a conference with many interesting essays, largely on Fo’s theatre, and a preface written by Fo. Giovanni Capecchi, Lo straniero nemico e fratello: letteratura italiana e Grande Guerra, Bologna, CLUEB, 298 pp., explores for the first time different genres from journals to memoirs, from short stories to private letters, written during WWI, shedding light on this crucial time frame and providing the reader with an exclusive critical view and better understanding of the events. Francesco Capello, Citta specchio: soggettivita e spazio urbano in Palazzeschi, Govoni e Boine, Milan, Angeli, 206 pp., examines the role and meaning of the city in the novels of these three writers from a literary and psychoanalytical viewpoint. All the essays collected in Tra Eco e Calvino: relazioni rizomatiche. Atti del Convegno Eco & Calvino: Rhizomatic Relationships: University of Toronto, 13–14 aprile 2012, ed. Rocco Capozzi and Stefano Bartezzaghi, Milan, EncycloMedia, 448 pp., focus on some of the common themes on E. and C.’s novels, in particular their experimentation and literary pastiche. Melissa Coburn, Race and Narrative in Italian Women’s Writing Since Unification, Madison, Fairleigh Dickinson U.P., 127 pp., explores the concepts of race and racism in texts by Grazia Deledda, Matilde Serao, Natalia Ginzsburg and Gabriella Ghermandi. ‘On ne naît pas...on le devient’. I gender studies e il caso italiano, dagli anni Settanta a oggi, ed. Lisa El Ghaoui and Filippo Fonio, Grenoble, GERCI, 339 pp., is a bilingual French and Italian collection Novecento 345 of the proceedings of the conference on Italian gender studies from the Seventies to the present. Chiara Ferrari, The Rhetoric of Violence and Sacrifice in Fascist Italy: Mussolini, Gadda, Vittorini, Toronto U.P., 288 pp. explores the texts of G. and V. to understand how the rhetoric of sacrifice and its populist elements permeated the Fascist regime. Daniela Frisone, Sicilia, l’avanguardia, Florence, Cesati, 245 pp., discusses the lesser known Futurist movement in Syracuse, Sicily. Of particular interest are the sections on the journal ‘La Vampa Letteraria’ and the avant-garde documents by young writers such as Enrico Cardile, Salvatore Quasimodo and Antonio Bruno, to cite a few. Manuele Gragnolati, Amor che move: linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini e Morante, Milan, Il saggiatore, 231 pp., offers an interesting interpretation of P. and M.’s novels in the light of D.’s works. Franca Iacovetta and Lorenza Stradiotti, ‘Betrayal, Vengeance, and the Anarchist Ideal: Virgilia D’Andrea’s Radical Antifascism in (American) Exile, 1928–1933’, JWoH, 25,1:85–110 ,studies women in the antifascist movement, in particular Virgilia D’Andrea and her speeches from a tour in the United States, including an analysis of historical and political themes. Ernestina Pellegrini, Il grande sonno: immagini della morte in Verga, De Roberto, Pirandello, Tomasi di Lampedusa, Sciascia, Bufalino, Florence, Florence Art, 218 pp., is a poignant analysis of death and its role on some of these authors’ works. Maurizio Pistelli, La giovane narrativa italiana: scritture di fine millennio, Rome, Donzelli, x + 258 pp., looks at some writers of the new generation, from Palandri, Tondelli, and De Carlo to Ammaniti and Nove, in order to underline a common style where influences from cinema, music, cartoons, internet and TV coexist and modify each other, and where there is no longer any distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature. Donato Sperduto, Armonie lontane. Ariosto, Croce, D’Annunzio, Pavese, Carlo Levi e Scotellaro, Rome, Aracne, 104 pp., is an important contribution that offers new and thought-provoking interpretations of the authors cited who share a search for harmony. Particular attention is devoted to the last, and least known, text by Levi. Laura Rorato, ‘Writing for or Writing about Children? The Representation of Childhood in Contemporary Italian Fiction’, FMLS, 49.2:145–53, looks at novels by Fabrizia Ramondino, Nicoletta Vallorani and Susanna Tamaro, whose main themes are relationships between adults and children. Brigitte Urbani, *Jongleurs des temps modernes: Dario Fo et Franca Rame, Aix-en-Provence, Provence U.P., 304 pp. Isabella von Treskow, *Judenverfolgung in Italien (1938–1945) in Romanen von Marta Ottolenghi Minerbi, Giorgio Bassani, Francesco Burdin und Elsa Morante, Fakten, Fiktion, Projektion. Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 466 pp. Gaoheng Zhang, ‘Contemporary Italian Novels on Chinese Immigration to Italy’, CIS, 4.2:1–38, is a survey of some Chinese immigrant writers and their novels, their place and cultural identity in a new reality and how they are perceived by Italian society in general.

2. Individual Authors Alvaro. Azzerare le distanze: carteggio 1934–1940, ed. Lorella Anna Giuliani, Soveria Mannelli, Rubbettino, 346 pp., is a critical edition of the correspondence between A. and his publisher Valentino Bompiani between 1934 and 1940, in which aspects of their working relationship and their literary choices help one to understand the writer’s work more fully. Gennaro Mercogliano, Corrado Alvaro, Paludi, Ferrari, 207 pp., focuses on A.’s work with a detailed critical analysis. Paura sul mondo: per ‘L’uomo è forte’ di Corrado Alvaro: seminario di studi, Reggio Calabria, 13–14 febbraio 2009, ed. Aldo Maria Morace and Angelo Raffaele Pupino, Pisa, ETS, 238 pp., publishes the proceedings of a 2009 conference on the novel L’uomo è forte. Of the nine essays included, of particular interest are the ones by Nino Borsellino, Romano Luperini and Marco Manotta.