Disrupted Narratives
Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini

Emma Bond

Italian Perspectives 24

Legenda

10 October 2012  •  197pp

ISBN: 978-1-907975-38-7 (hardback)  •  RRP £80, $110, €95

ISBN: 978-1-315094-85-4 (Taylor & Francis ebook)

ItalianFiction


If Madame Bovary’s death in Flaubert’s 1857 novel marked the definitive end of the Romantic vision of literary disease, then the advent of psychoanalysis less than half a century later heralded an entirely new set of implications for literature dealing with illness. The theorization of a potential unconscious double (capable of expressing the body, and thus also the intimate damage caused by disease) in turn suggested a capacity to subvert or destabilize the text, exposing the main thread of the narrative to be unreliable or self-conscious. Indeed, the authors examined in this study (Italo Svevo (1861-1928), Giorgio Pressburger (1937-) and Giuliana Morandini (1938-)) all make use of individual ‘infected’ or suppressed voices within their texts which unfold through illness to cast doubt on a more (conventionally) dominant narrative standpoint. Applying the theories of Freud and more recent writings by Julia Kristeva, Bond offers a new critical reading of the literary function of illness, a function related to the very nature of narration itself.

Emma Bond is Senior Retained Lecturer in Italian at Pembroke College, Oxford.

Bibliography entry:

Bond, Emma, Disrupted Narratives: Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini, Italian Perspectives, 24 (Legenda, 2012)

First footnote reference: 35 Emma Bond, Disrupted Narratives: Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini, Italian Perspectives, 24 (Legenda, 2012), p. 21.

Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Bond, p. 47.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

Bibliography entry:

Bond, Emma. 2012. Disrupted Narratives: Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini, Italian Perspectives, 24 (Legenda)

Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Bond 2012: 21).

Example footnote reference: 35 Bond 2012: 21.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)


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