A Gaping Wound
Mourning in Italian Poetry

Edited by Adele Bardazzi, Francesco Giusti, and Emanuela Tandello

Italian Perspectives 54

Legenda

20 October 2022  •  198pp

ISBN: 978-1-839540-49-3 (hardback)  •  RRP £85, $115, €99

ISBN: 978-1-839540-50-9 (paperback, forthcoming)

ISBN: 978-1-839540-51-6 (JSTOR ebook)

Access online: Books@JSTOR

ItalianPoetry


Poetry has always maintained a particular relationship with mourning and its rituals, but what is it that lyric discourse has to offer in coping with death, grief, and bereavement? On the other hand, how does mourning become a central creative force in lyric poetry? How does this affect the nature of its discourse and the desires it performs? Focusing on poems by Giacomo Leopardi, Guido Gozzano, Giorgio Caproni, Giorgio Bassani, Amelia Rosselli, Antonella Anedda, and Vivian Lamarque, the essays collected in this volume explore how poetry dwells on the boundaries between high lyric and vernacular forms, the personal and the political, the local and the national, the individual and the collective, one’s own story and public history, the masculine and the feminine, individual expression and shared language. The Italian poetic tradition finds two crucial milestones in two collections of poems devoted to the lost beloved, Dante’s Vita Nova and Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and its modern and contemporary ramifications have much to offer for reflection on the ethics and poetics of mourning.

Adele Bardazzi is Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and Honorary Faculty Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Francesco Giusti is Career Development Fellow and Tutor in Italian at Christ Church, University of Oxford. Emanuela Tandello is Emeritus Student of Christ Church, Oxford.

Reviews:

  • ‘Indagine agile e accattivante, A Gaping Wound fornisce una chiara ed elegante mappatura dell’evoluzione del mourning letterario italiano e si pone come strumento critico innovativo e proficuo a chi voglia conoscere e vagliare il variegato universo della Sehnsucht autoriale postmoderna.’ — 580-82, Annali d'Italianistica 2023, 41, Olimpia Pelosi
  • ‘A significant and much-needed contribution to scholarship and promisingly opens new directions of research on mourning, a theme that in the past few decades has regained public attention — an unsurprising resurgence given its political implications and central role in our lives.’ — Simona Di Martino, Modern Language Review 119.3, July 2024, 419-21 (full text online)

Contents:

1

Introduction: Why Mourning in Poetry?
Adele Bardazzi, Francesco Giusti, Emanuela Tandello

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2

The Loss of Poetry: Leopardi’s ‘Coro di morti’
Emanuela Tandello

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3

Carlotta’s Ghost
Fabio A. Camilletti

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4

Mourning Over Her Image: The Re-enactment of Lyric Gestures in Giorgio Caproni’s ‘Versi livornesi’
Francesco Giusti

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5

Giorgio Bassani, the Poet-Ghost, and the Memorial Duty of the Survivor
Martina Piperno

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6

The Space of Mourning: Elettra’s mise en abyme
Marzia D’Amico

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7

Mourning in Translation: The Sardinian Poetry of Antonella Anedda
Adele Bardazzi

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8

Mourning and Lyric Address in Vivian Lamarque’s Madre d’inverno
Vilma De Gasperin

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Bibliography entry:

Bardazzi, Adele, Francesco Giusti, and Emanuela Tandello (eds), A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry, Italian Perspectives, 54 (Legenda, 2022)

First footnote reference: 35 A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry, ed. by Adele Bardazzi, Francesco Giusti, and Emanuela Tandello, Italian Perspectives, 54 (Legenda, 2022), p. 21.

Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Bardazzi, Giusti, and Tandello, p. 47.

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

Bibliography entry:

Bardazzi, Adele, Francesco Giusti, and Emanuela Tandello (eds). 2022. A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry, Italian Perspectives, 54 (Legenda)

Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Bardazzi, Giusti, and Tandello 2022: 21).

Example footnote reference: 35 Bardazzi, Giusti, and Tandello 2022: 21.

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


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