1,721,086 research outputs found
Oscar Wilde and the Language of Music
No full textThe relationship between Wilde and music is extremely rich and complex: it involves the author’s knowledge and love for the music of his time and of previous centuries, the many references to music in his oeuvre, the literary use of forms such as chansons and ballads, the musical organization of some of his major works, the musicality of his verses and of his aphorisms but also the music of his own voice (reported by many contemporaries). Most importantly, Wilde’s very commitment to the idea of performance in art and in life will attract many Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries musicians – such as David Bowie, Gavin Friday and Morrissey – who, beside adopting a Wildean stance, will also set his verses to music, or write music inspired by the author and by his writings, showing how the strength of Wilde’s life and work also resides in its capacity of easily translating into non-literary modes
Commedia dell'Arte, Shakespeare and Goldoni. Circulation of theatrical energy through the re-presentation of oral traditions
No full textShakespeare as adaptor of consolidated oral conventions and experiences nelonging abroad and to an early phase of the world theatre history and scrpted them in order to create an effective form of entertainment for his own nation and time. When he isolated the mitif os 'mistaken identities' he made use of Plautus ' influence on the one hand, and of the influence of a popular, oral source, that of Commedia dell'Arte. Through it, an anlogy is built with the context where Goldoni operated in Italy, in the XVIIth cent., carrying out his reformation of the comedy as a genre
L'eroe vittoriano e i suoi modelli: l' "Ulisse" di Tennyson.
No full textThe critical tradition on Tennyson prefers to see him as a sophisticated and refined elegiac poet who officiates mild Christian wisdom and bland anxieties of religious faith against the spreading scientism. This study of the sources and the models elaborated in Tennyson’s Ulysses (1842) demonstrates the way in which the poet disrupted, through the reshaping of the Homeric tragic hero, the solid system of values standing at the base of the Empire.
This essay throws light on the rich intertextual system on which the poem is based. Particular attention is given to classical sources such as the Odyssey (Book XI, ll. 100-37), Sophocles’s Ajax and Philoctetes, Euripide’s Hecuba, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, (13.183), Seneca’s Troades and modern ones, starting with Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (III.iii. from line 150 onwards) and echoes from poets such as Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley.
In Tennyson’s poem this complex and elaborated system is welded together with a lacerated Victorian sensibility. Particular attention is also paid to the reflection on the relationship with the past, seen through the prism of Dante’s Inferno (Canto XXVI, lines 90-126).
The essay also throws light on a still unacknowledged, or neglected, source standing on the base of the character of Telemachus. Tennyson’s innovative introduction of this character has, as a matter of fact, strong analogies with Les aventures di Télémaque written by F. de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon (1699)
"Excursus analitico su Stevie Smith"
No full textStudio sull'opera poetica di Stevie Smith dalla prima produzione degli anni trenta alle opere della maturità. Si prendono in esame fenomeni stilistici come il titolo onomastico, il dialogismo, l'interrogazione, l'anacrisi, l'envelope di inizio-fine, la personificazione, l'epanalessi infantile, le paronomasie, i calembour, l'ironia, il limerick...
Fra i topoi studiati ricorrono la morte per acqua, la demenza veggente, la vitalità animale, la decostruzione delle tematiche romantico-sentimentali. Proprio quest'ultimo aspetto marca con forza l'assiologia della poetessa, che si esprime in liriche solitamente brevi, apparentemente semplici, ma in realtà di un complesso dadaismo cantilenante
Shakespeare va alla guerra. Conflitti contemporanei in alcune rivisitazioni sceniche del canone
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Sonic Wastelands and Off-Key Tunes in Angloamerican Literature, with Two Case Studies
No full textThis essay deals with disquieting soundscapes of US literature, from the colonial times to modern wastelands and even to planet Mars. The aim is to counterbalance the positive values of nation building by analyzing literary representations of sonic nightmares
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
“Would Be a Lonesome Old Sail Without a Song”: Popular Music in Postcolonial Literature
No full textThe French Canadian critic François Paré thinks that songs are a huge agent of cultural development, and affirms that minority cultures give the lyrics of classic pop songs, folksongs and popular songs an immediate literary value. In this essay I try to verify how English postcolonial writers use folk and/or singer-songwriters' songs in their works, both as themes and at a linguistic and structural level. Starting from Leonard Cohen, whose career as a singer and songwriter is forecasted in his autobiographical novel The Favourite Game, I take into account such novels as The Ground Beneath her Feet by Salman Rushdie and The Commitments by Roddy Doyle, whose protagonists are rock musicians. Yet, the core of my essay are those literary works where songs are so intertwined with fiction that they become part of it, such as Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan, The Nanny and the Iceberg by Ariel Dorfman, Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje and Ghost Light, by Joseph O’ Connor
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