| Contents |
Introduction: Whole or nothing. The method: hermeneutics between Gadamer and Betti ; The story: humanism between Petrarch and Gramsci -- Primi and ultimi: Petrarch's corpus. Introduction: total Petrarch, different Petrarch? ; "I was not born to be a slave of my body": (Re-)writing the past ; Reading the future ; Including the excluded: Petrarch's familiar invectives ; Conclusion -- The purpose of literary criticism: Francesco De Sanctis's (Anti-)Petrarchism. Introduction: Italian Petrarch, (Un-)congenial Petrarch ; A rhetorical existence ; "Going to the people": literary criticism as moral philosophy ; The anti-Petrarch ; Conclusion: Petrarch as Pharmakon -- "Do not grow weary of reading, for I do not grow weary of writing": Goldoni's reform of Italian literature. Introduction ; Enough is enough: the Italian comic complex ; Reforming...from without ; "With the mask I'm Brighella, without the mask I'm a man": reforming...from within ; Conclusion: if not Moli ere, then what? -- The Vichian resurrection of commedia dell'arte: reciprocating modernity between Italy and France. Introduction ; Vico's laughter ; Giving and receiving modernity: a shared vichism ; " A quoi bon le th e atre italien?" ; Conclusion -- Remembering is not thinking: Croce, Gramsci, and Italian intellectual autobiography. Introduction ; Beyond laughter ; For a "reform" of Italian thought" ; "A tall and blond Marx": Antonio Labriola and Benedetto Croce ; Rehearsing the anti-Croce ; The (auto-)biography of a nation ; Conclusion -- Conclusion: the last Renaissance man. |
| Abstract |
"Rocco Rubini studies the motives and literary forms in the making of a "tradition," not understood narrowly, as the conservative, stubborn preservation of received conventions, values, and institutions, but rather more generously and etymologically interpreted: as the deliberate effort on the part of writers to transmit a reformulated past across generations. Leveraging Italian thinkers from Petrarch to Gramsci, with stops at the most prominent humanists in between (including Giambattista Vico, Carlo Goldoni, Francesco De Sanctis, and Benedetto Croce), Rubini gives us an innovative lens through which to view an Italian intellectual tradition that is at once premodern and modern, a legacy that does not depend on a date or a single masterpiece, but instead requires the reader to parse an entire career of writings to uncover deeper, transhistorical continuities that span 600 years. Whether reading forward to the 1930s, or backward to the 14th century, Rubini elucidates the interplay of creation and reception underlying the enactment of tradition, the practice of retrieving and conserving, and the revivification of shared themes and intentions linking these thinkers across time"-- Provided by publisher. |
