Pier Pasolini's "trilogy of life" is a series of film adaptations of major texts of the past: The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and One Thousand and One Nights. The movies demonstrate a film author's acute aesthetic sensibility through a highly original cinematic rendering of the sources. The first two films, closely examined in this book, offer a personal, purposefully stylized vision of the Middle Ages, as though Pasolini were dreaming Boccaccio's and Chaucer's texts through the filter of his "heretic" consciousness. The unusual poetic visualization of the source works, which could be described as irreverent cinematic homage, has the potential to renew the traditional reading of such literature. This book shows how cinema becomes an alternative form of storytelling. It first studies the two films in detail, putting them in perspective within the trilogy. Next it interprets them, recounting misinterpretations and expounding upon Pasolini's ideological perception, and defends the oft-criticized adaptations. Finally, it discusses how the films represent innovation over strict adaptation. Appendices offer charts with information on the narrative structures of the films and the correspondences between them.

In the time of a devastating pandemic, seven women and three men withdraw to a country estate outside Florence to give themselves a diversion from the death around them. Once there, they decide to spend some time each day telling stories, each of the ten to tell one story each day. They do this for ten days, with a few other days of rest in between, resulting in the 100 stories of the Decameron. The Decameron was written after the Black Plague spread through Italy in 1348. Most of the tales did not originate with Boccaccio; some of them were centuries old already in his time, but Boccaccio imbued them all with his distinctive style. The stories run the gamut from tragedy to comedy, from lewd to inspiring, and sometimes all of those at once. They also provide a detailed picture of daily life in fourteenth-century Italy.

Noted as a ‘civil poet’ by Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini was a creative and philosophical genius whose works challenged generations of Western Europeans and Americans to reconsider not only issues regarding the self, but also various social concerns. Pasolini’s works touched and continues to inspire students, scholars, and intellectuals alike to question the status quo. This collection of thirteen articles and two interviews evidences the on-going discourse around Pasolini’s lasting impressions on the new generation. Pasolini’s Lasting Impressions: Death, Eros and Literary Enterprise in the Opus of Pier Paolo Pasolini thus explores the civic poet’s oeuvre in four parts: poetry, theatre, film, and culture. Although the collection does not include every genre in which Pasolini wrote, it addresses many, some which often receive little or no attention, particularly in Italian Studies of North America. The underlining theme of the book, ‘death, eros and literary enterprise’ intertwines these genres in a rather unique way, allowing for inter-disciplinary interpretations to Pasolini’s rich opus. The edited volume concludes with two artists, Dacia Maraini and Ominio71’s reflections on Pasolini in the 21st century. In fact, the cover represents a recent work on Ominio71 underscoring Pasolini’s visual presence still within the Roman walls. In conclusion, this collection demonstrates how his works still influence contemporary Italian society and motivate intellectual dialogue through new theoretical outlooks on Pasolini’s oeuvre.

Before his mysterious murder in 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini had become famous—and infamous—not only for his groundbreaking films and literary works but also for his homosexuality and criticism of capitalism, colonialism, and Western materialism. In Pier Paolo Pasolini: Performing Authorship, Gian Maria Annovi revisits Pasolini's oeuvre to examine the author's performance as a way of assuming an antagonistic stance toward forms of artistic, social, and cultural oppression. Annovi connects Pasolini's notion of authorship to contemporary radical artistic practices and today's multimedia authorship. Annovi considers the entire range of Pasolini's work, including his poetry, narrative and documentary film, dramatic writings, and painting, as well as his often scandalous essays on politics, art, literature, and theory. He interprets Pasolini's multimedia authorial performance as a masochistic act to elicit rejection, generate hostility, and highlight the contradictions that structure a repressive society. Annovi shows how questions of authorial self-representation and self-projection relate to the artist's effort to undermine the assumptions of his audience and criticize the conformist practices that the culture industry and mass society impose on the author. Pasolini reveals the critical potential of his spectacular celebrity by using the author's corporeal or vocal presence to address issues of sexuality and identity, and through his strategic self-fashioning in films, paintings, and photographic portraits he destabilizes the audience's assumptions about the author.

An exploration of the influence of Italy and Italians on Chaucer’s life and writing. Geoffrey Chaucer might be considered the quintessential English writer, but he drew much of his inspiration and material from Italy. In fact, without the tremendous influence of Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio (among others), the author of The Canterbury Tales might never have assumed his place as the “father” of English literature. Nevertheless, Richard Owen’s Chaucer’s Italy begins in London, where the poet dealt with Italian merchants in his roles as court diplomat and customs official. Next Owen takes us, via Chaucer’s capture at the siege of Rheims, to his involvement in arranging the marriage of King Edward III’s son Lionel in Milan and his missions to Genoa and Florence. By scrutinizing his encounters with Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the mercenary knight John Hawkwood—and with vividly evocative descriptions of the Arezzo, Padua, Florence, Certaldo, and Milan that Chaucer would have encountered—Owen reveals the deep influence of Italy’s people and towns on Chaucer’s poems and stories. Much writing on Chaucer depicts a misleadingly parochial figure, but as Owen’s enlightening short study of Chaucer’s Italian years makes clear, the poet’s life was internationally eventful. The consequences have made the English canon what it is today.

A journey to the Italian cinema that overturns established views and opens up new perspectives and interpretations. Its itinerary is organized in four stages. The first is an analysis of the theories of Cesare Zavattini on neorealism which overturns widely accepted positions both on Zavattini and on neorealism. The second confronts a key film of the post-war Italian cinema, Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà, by examining the nature of its realism. The third is dedicated to Luchino Visconti: to questions of the use of language exemplified in his La terra trema, the use of settings, costume and light as agents of meaning in his Il Gattopardo and Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa. The final voyage of the film is to the physical and symbolic construction of heaven and earth in the work of Pasolini. Particular attention is given to the representation of the body in his last four films: the grotesque and mythical bodies in popular tradition in his Trilogia di vita and the tortured bodies destroyed by the mass media in Salò.

This unique and exciting collection, inspired by the scholarship of literary critic Stephanie Trigg, offers cutting-edge responses to the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer for the current critical moment. The chapters are linked by the organic and naturally occurring affinities that emerge from Trigg's ongoing legacy; containing diverse methodological approaches and themes, they engage with Chaucer through ecocriticism, medieval literary and historical criticism, and medievalism. The contributors, trailblazing international specialists in their respective fields, honour Trigg's distinctive and energetic mode of enquiry (the symptomatic long history) and intellectual contribution to the humanities. At the same time, their approaches exemplify shifting trends in Chaucer scholarship. Like Chaucer's pilgrims, these scholars speak to and alongside each other, but their essays are also attentive to 'hearing Chaucer speak' then, now and in the future.