Menotti Lerro is one of the most interesting poets of modern-day Europe. Born in a small village just outside of Salerno, Southern Italy, in 1980, he has produced an impressive range of publications, including essays, poetry, fiction, autobiography, and drama. His is a poetry concerned with powerful imagery, the physicality and vulnerability of the body, the meaning of objects, the interpretation of memories, and the philosophical importance of identity. For the first time, the rich colours and textures of Lerro’s verse are available in English. This volume presents the power of the poet’s voice in all its aching magnificence and demonstrates how it represents the sounds and rhythms of a new generation.

The volume traces the founding critical theories of the autobiographical genre, from the Enlightenment period to the most recent developments, which, since the Sixties and the essays of Roy Pascal and Jean Starobinski, have had a greater and greater influence. It offers – in contrast to the essential, and by now classic, definition of Philippe Lejeune – an increased effectiveness of the poem to express the narrative purposes of autobiography, recognizing poetic writing that has the extraordinary ability to say what “the mortal language does not say,” to quote Leopardi. The works of Seamus Heaney, Thom Gunn, Carlos Barral and Jaime Gil de Biedma are analyzed here, and show an unveiling of the self through memories, places and objects that often characterize them and that allow, to whomever recalls one’s own experience through writing, the recovery and restoration of essential meanings to the reconstruction not only of subjective identity, but also of one’s own community.

This volume explores a web of complex relationships between body and mind, discussing the efforts of individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds to define, to achieve, or to reject the “normal”; and, in some cases, to put something else in its place. After considering the problems arising from other people’s perceptions of non-standard bodies, the book turns to gender: is it written “upon the body”, established at birth, determined only by physical traits and distinguished by material things such as clothes; or is it written “within the body”, defined through the subject’s own feelings? It considers what happens when “males” consider themselves “female”, and “females” consider themselves “male”. It concludes with the analysis of four books, by different authors with different sexual orientations. Two of these volumes might be considered “genuine autobiographies”, while the other two are novels which include numerous autobiographical features that reflect the authors’ own thoughts.

This book explores the newly founded Empathic Movement. The movement began in 2020, when noted artists were called upon by Menotti Lerro to sign the Empathic Manifesto, bringing their individual expressions of the “arts” together in a less individualistic way. They then started to help create a new cultural pole in southern Italy, giving life to the Contemporary Arts Centre, which founded the Poetry Village, the Village of Aphorisms, and the Cilento Poetry Prize, and shone light on a new cultural territory. The book argues that the decentralization of culture gives voice to the silent masses, especially the peasant voices in the mountains, with a particular emphasis on intense and genuine emotion and feelings shared with others through the arts, rejecting individualism, social exclusion, and excessive competition between artists. The symbolic myth of the movement is called Unus: a semi-unknown god representing the Total Artist who was killed, torn to pieces, and thrown into the Alento river by his brothers, leading to the old separation of the arts.

Providing the most complete record possible of texts by Italian writers active after 1900, this annotated bibliography covers over 4,800 distinct editions of writings by some 1,700 Italian authors. Many entries are accompanied by useful notes that provide information on the authors, works, translators, and the reception of the translations. This book includes the works of Pirandello, Calvino, Eco, and more recently, Andrea Camilleri and Valerio Manfredi. Together with Robin Healey’s Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation, also published by University of Toronto Press in 2011, this volume makes comprehensive information on translations from Italian accessible for schools, libraries, and those interested in comparative literature.

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