Highlights and critically assesses the work of contemporary Italian political philosophers. Italy has a rich philosophical legacy, and recent developments and movements in its political philosophy have produced a significant body of thought by internationally renowned philosophers working on questions and themes such as the critique of neoliberalism, statehood, politics and culture, feminism, community, the stranger, and the relationship between politics and action. This volume brings this conversation to English-language readers, considering well-known Italian philosophers such as Vattimo, Agamben, Esposito, and Negri, as well as philosophers with whom English-language readers are less acquainted, such as Luce Fabbri, Adriana Cavarero, and Lea Melandri. In addition, the essays extend the conversation beyond the realm of Italian philosophy, bringing its thinkers into dialogue with philosophical figures including Badiou, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari, Adorno, Arendt, Foucault, Wittgenstein, and the Peruvian historian and sociologist Anibal Quijano.

In the 1930s translation became a key issue in the cultural politics of the Fascist regime due to the fact that Italy was publishing more translations than any other country in the world. Making use of extensive archival research, the author of this new study examines this 'invasion of translations' through a detailed statistical analysis of the translation market. The book shows how translations appeared to challenge official claims about the birth of a Fascist culture and cast Italy in a receptive role that did not tally with Fascist notions of a dominant culture extending its influence abroad. The author shows further that the commercial impact of this invasion provoked a sustained reaction against translated popular literature on the part of those writers and intellectuals who felt threatened by its success. He examines the aggressive campaign that was conducted against the Italian Publishers Federation by the Authors and Writers Union (led by the Futurist poet F. T. Marinetti), accusing them of favouring their private profit over the national interest. Finally, the author traces the evolution of Fascist censorship, showing how the regime developed a gradually more repressive policy towards translations as notions of cultural purity began to influence the perception of imported literature.

Through entries on 291 Italian books (451 editions) published in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, covering the years 1558-1603, this catalogue represents a summary of current research and knowledge of diffusion of Italian culture on English literature in this period. It also provides a foundation for new work on Anglo-Italian relations in Elizabethan England. Mary Augusta Scott's 1916 Elizabethan Translations from the Italian forms the basis for the catalogue; Soko Tomita adds 59 new books and eliminates 23 of Scott's original entries. The information here is presented in a user-friendly and uncluttered manner, guided by Philip Gaskell's principles of bibliographical description; the volume includes bibliographical descriptions, tables, graphs, images, and two indices (general and title). In an attempt to restore each book to its original status, each entry is concerned not only with the physical book, but with the human elements guiding it through production: the relationship with the author, editor, translator, publisher, book-seller, and patron are all recounted as important players in the exploration of cultural significance. Renaissance Anglo-Italian relations were marked by both patriotism and xenophobia; this catalogue provides reliable and comprehensive information about books and publication as well as concrete evidence of what elements of Italian culture the English responded to and how Italian culture was acclimatized into Elizabethan England.

Italian Forgers takes an unorthodox approach to the fascinating topic of art forgery, focusing not on art forgery per se, but on the major forgery scandals that shifted the Italian art market in response to constant, and often intense, demand for Italian objects. By focusing on power dynamics that both precipitated forgery scandals and forged Italian cultural identities, this book connects the debates and discussions about three well-known Italian forgers—Giovanni Bastianini, Icilio Joni, and Alceo Dossena—to anchor and investigate the mechanics of the Italian art market from unification through the fascist era. Carol Helstosky examines foreign accounts of transactions and Italian writings about the art market. The actions and words of Italian dealers illustrate how the Italian art and antiquities market was an undeniably modern industry, on par with tourism in terms of its contribution to the Italian economy and to understandings of Italian identity. These accounts also reveal how dealers, artists, go-betweens, guides, and restorers worked to not only meet the intense demand for Italian products but also to develop highly sophisticated business practices to maintain financial stability and respond to shifts in demand consciously (but not always conscientiously). Italian Forgers weaves a compelling narrative about the history of Italian identity, forgery, and the value of the past. As a result, Helstosky brings historical perspective to the study of art forgery and art fraud. She reveals how historical circumstances and structural imbalances of cultural power shaped the market for art and antiquities and amplified incidents of art deception and forgery scandals.

Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English Lexicography is a systematic and accessible introduction to the lexicology of modern English. Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that studies all aspects of the vocabulary of a particular language. The book provides an account of the sources of modern English words and studies the development of vocabulary over time. It examines: What are words? Where do English words come from? How are words made up? How do words 'mean'? How are words used? How can words be investigated? This new edition of the best-selling textbook has been revised and updated throughout. This second edition features: - Updated chapters on dictionaries and corpus linguistics - Summaries of content at the beginning of each chapter - A revised list of suggestions for further reading - A new glossary Words, Meaning and Vocabulary is an essential introduction to lexicology for undergraduate students.

Through a visually oriented investigation of historical (in)visibility in early modern Italy, the essays in this volume recover those women - wives, widows, mistresses, the illegitimate - who have been erased from history in modern literature, rendered invisible or obscured by history or scholarship, as well as those who were overshadowed by male relatives, political accident, or spatial location. A multi-faceted invisibility of the individual and of the object is the thread that unites the chapters in this volume. Though some women chose to be invisible, for example the cloistered nun, these essays show that in fact, their voices are heard or seen through their commissions and their patronage of the arts, which afforded them some visibility. Invisibility is also examined in terms of commissions which are no longer extant or are inaccessible. What is revealed throughout the essays is a new way of looking at works of art, a new way to visualize the past by addressing representational invisibility, the marginalized or absent subject or object and historical (in)visibility to discover who does the 'looking,' and how this shapes how something or someone is visible or invisible. The result is a more nuanced understanding of the place of women and gender in early modern Italy.

Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy is the first book-length examination of the early career of one of the early modern period’s most notoriously misunderstood figures. Born around 1541, Domenikos Theotokopoulos began his career as an icon painter on the island of Crete. He is best known, under the name “El Greco,” for the works he created while in Spain, paintings that have provoked both rapt admiration and scornful disapproval since his death in 1614. But the nearly ten years he spent in Venice and Rome, from 1567 to 1576, have remained underexplored until now. Andrew Casper’s examination of this period allows us to gain a proper understanding of El Greco’s entire career and reveals much about the tumultuous environment for religious painting after the Council of Trent. Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy is a new book in the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Thanks to the AHPI grant, this book will be available in popular e-book formats.