Are you curious about the private laboratory of Giacomo Leopardi, Italy’s greatest modern lyrical poet? Interested in using expert maps to explore it, while deepening your acquaintance with one of the most creative materialist thinkers? This collection of essays makes very original use of the new translation of Leopardi’s Zibaldone di pensieri and investigates its connections to all his other works. Whether your primary interest lies in Italian literature and criticism, linguistics and poetics, the origins of genres such as the fantastic, or in philosophical queries regarding materialism and hedonism, this collection offers original research that will challenge the reader to view this outstanding intellectual in a new light. Offering some of the earliest reflections against anthropocentrism, championing the artist’s interest in the natural sciences, and questioning humanity’s purpose(s) in this world, Leopardi’s work is presented in this volume as an indispensable tool to understand the complexity of Italy’s cultural transformations between the 18th and the 19th centuries.

Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) crossed paths during their lifetimes, and though they never met, the legacy of their work betrays a shared destiny. As prominent figures who challenged and contributed to the Romantic debate, Leopardi and Shelley hold important roles in the history of their respective national literatures, but paradoxically experienced a controversial and delayed reception outside their native lands. Cerimonia‘s wide-ranging study brings together these two poets for the first time for an exploration of their afterlives, through a close reading of hitherto unstudied translations. This intriguing journey tells the story, from its origins, of the two poets critical fortune, and examines their position in the cultural debates of the nineteenth century; in disputes regarding translation theories and practices; and shows the configuration of their identities as we understand their legacy today.

Providing a comprehensive introduction to the work of pioneering poet-philosopher Giacomo Leopardi, Alice Gibson pushes his thought into new directions by investigating how his ethics and philosophy of nature offer means for understanding and taking responsibility for the environmental crisis. Through examination of the whole of Leopardi's oeuvre, from the Zibaldone to the poems he wrote towards the end of his life, this book disrupts the common image of Leopardi as a pessimist poet whose works contribute to the nihilistic tradition. The Ethics of Giacomo Leopardi instead uncovers his forward-looking views on living in a multispecies world, in which humans live alongside other living beings in a delicate ecosystem that not only requires respect, but also instigates wonder. Bringing Leopardi's thought into dialogue with contemporary ecological theorists such as Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Timothy Morton, Gibson reveals how a Leopardian ethics of solidarity, compassion and community is the guide we need today to reframe our relationship with nature.

*** Winner of the2019 Flaiano Prize in the category Italian Studies *** In Fellini's Eternal Rome, Alessandro Carrera explores the co-existence and conflict of paganism and Christianity in the works of Federico Fellini. By combining source analysis, cultural history and jargon-free psychoanalytic film theory, Carrera introduces the reader to a new appreciation of Fellini's work. Life-affirming Franciscanism and repressive Counter-Reformation dogmatism live side by side in Fellini's films, although he clearly tends toward the former and resents the latter. The fascination with pre-Christian Rome shines through La Dolce Vita and finds its culmination in Fellini-Satyricon, the most audacious attempt to imagine what the West would be if Christianity had never replaced classical Rome. Minimal clues point toward a careful, extremely subtle use of classical texts and motifs. Fellini's interest in the classics culminates in Olympus, a treatment of Hesiod's Theogony for a never-realized TV miniseries on Greek mythology, here introduced for the first time to an English-speaking readership. Fellini's recurrent dream of the Mediterranean Goddess is shaped by the phantasmatic projection of paganism that Christianity created as its convenient Other. His characters long for a “maternal space” where they will be protected from mortality and left free to roam. Yet Fellini shows how such maternal space constantly fails, not because the Church has erased it, but because the utopia of unlimited enjoyment is a self-defeating fantasy.

How humanity came to contemplate its possible extinction. From forecasts of disastrous climate change to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences and the impending perils of genome editing, our species is increasingly concerned with the prospects of its own extinction. With humanity's future on this planet seeming more insecure by the day, in the twenty-first century, existential risk has become the object of a growing field of serious scientific inquiry. But, as Thomas Moynihan shows in X-Risk, this preoccupation is not exclusive to the post-atomic age of global warming and synthetic biology. Our growing concern with human extinction itself has a history. Tracing this untold story, Moynihan revisits the pioneers who first contemplated the possibility of human extinction and stages the historical drama of this momentous discovery. He shows how, far from being a secular reprise of religious prophecies of apocalypse, existential risk is a thoroughly modern idea, made possible by the burgeoning sciences and philosophical tumult of the Enlightenment era. In recollecting how we first came to care for our extinction, Moynihan reveals how today's attempts to measure and mitigate existential threats are the continuation of a project initiated over two centuries ago, which concerns the very vocation of the human as a rational, responsible, and future-oriented being.

This volume celebrates fifty years of NeMLA’s important presence in the world of academia with a collection of essays that adopt a transnational critical lens. With the present selection, we intend to add our voices to the ongoing debate centered on the renegotiation of space, national, and cultural geographies; to foster both the re-thinking of language(s) and literature(s) not exclusively in English and the study of race, gender, sexuality, and class within and across national boundaries. Most pertinently for this collection, we hope to add meaningful material to produce new theoretical paradigms and to rethink the role and significance of the humanities in today’s world. In this light, 'Transnational Spaces: Celebrating Fifty Years of Literary, Cultural, and Language Intersections at NeMLA' offers a contribution to the study of our present, transnational condition, from the point of view of an organization, the 'Northeast Modern Language Association', that since its inception in 1969, has sought to provide a space of encounter, debate, and open intellectual exchange for all its members as well as for the academe at large. The essays contained in this volume emphasize the interdependency and interrelations engendered by the globalized world in which we live, highlighting the possibility to create new knowledge and forms of understanding across the boundaries of nationhood and region. At the same time, they remind us that the present situation calls for a radical self-examination of a history of systemic racism which continues to produce episodes of police brutality, rationalizes cultural and economic exclusion, and normalizes the incarceration of African Americans and “illegal” immigrants, including children and minorities. In this light, with this volume, we hope to have provided inclusive, egalitarian, and cosmopolitan spaces of encounter, exchange, and interrogation.

The widespread opinion is that Northrop Frye’s influence reached its zenith in the 1960s and 1970s, after which point he became obsolete, his work buried in obscurity. This almost universal opinion is summed up in Terry Eagleton’s 1983 rhetorical question, "Who now reads Frye?" In The Reception of Northrop Frye, Robert D. Denham catalogues what has been written about Frye – books, articles, translations, dissertations and theses, and reviews – in order to demonstrate that the attention Frye’s work has received from the beginning has progressed at a geomantic rate. Denham also explores what we can discover once we have a fairly complete record of Frye’s reception in front of us – such as Hayden White’s theory of emplotments applied to historical writing and Byron Almén’s theory of musical narrative. The sheer quantity of what has been written about Frye reveals that the only valid response to Eagleton’s rhetorical question is "a very large and growing number," the growth being not incremental but exponential.