Browse

Author of almost one hundred libretti for opera composers of the first half of the 18th century, Felice Romani has perfected a poetry technique that allows a successful combination of music and verse, thus becoming the favourite librettist of the belcanto authors Donizetti and Bellini. His stories are not original, but he masters the ability to adapt his sources in a light yet potent poetry with a strong impact upon the audience. Anna Bolena, put into music by Gaetano Donizetti, presents the tragic story of Henry ...

The paper deals with the exile view of Czech literary criticism in the past decades, reflected in two essays: one by Igor Hajek, and the other one by Kvetoslav Chvatik. Igor Hajek (1931–1995), a Czech literary critic, who went to exile in 1969, played a significant role in presenting Czech literature abroad. Kvetoslav Chvatik (1930–2012) was a Czech philosopher, aesthetician, art historian, and literary theorist. Hajek taught at universities in the English-speaking world, while Chvatik worked in a German-speak...

The contemporary Czech poet using the pseudonym Ewald Murrer (born in 1964 in Prague) used to be a representative of Czech underground literature before 1989. Then he became one of the most specific and original artists of his generation. The present essay deals with his very successful collection of poetry called The Diary of Mr. Pinke (1991, English translation published in 2022). Between the world wars, the most Eastern part of Czechoslovakia was so-called Subcarpathian Ruthenia (or Karpatenukraine in German). ...

The present paper is part of a broader research project, which aims at investigating the interviews given by Ana Blandiana, who is one of the most influential contemporary Romanian poets and a well-known dissident of the dictatorial regime of the 1970s and 1980s. These interviews were collected between 2019 and 2020 and subsequently grouped into three main categories, related to poetry, prose and essays. The resulting material was published in a volume entitled “Cartea cu delfini” (The book with dolphins) in 2...

The purpose of this study is to conduct a careful psychological investigation into the thought of one of the most important 20th century Irish writers, James Joyce (1882- 1941). The main focus of the analysis consists of some of the short stories contained in one of Joyce’s most famous works, Dubliners, with particular reference to Evelyne and at the same time examining some of the themes present and recurring in the Irish writer’s books. This work aims to demonstrate how in Joyce there is a strong interest in...

The present work aims to address the role that psychology plays within literary works starting from a "critical" reading aimed at understanding and recognizing the psychological and in some works also psychopathological traits present within the texts. Our goal will be to present the conscious and unconscious aspects of the various characters and identify the reasons that prompted the author to create and analyze certain psychological issues and certain environmental situations. The methodology that will be used w...

In my paper, the version of Urizen’s creation and existence particularly refers to/concerns the contrast/conflict between energy and reason. In Blake’s mythological system, Urizen is a false God which represents the distortion of truth and concerns the pragmatic, unspiritual apprehension, and appreciation of the mundane world as a creation of falsity which must be accepted by humans in order to survive, to secure life and multiply. Urizen creates and lives in an alienated and enslaving realm, a distorted menta...

Years and writing signatures apart, it would seem that Charles Dickens’s Hard Times has very little to do, if anything, with Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and/ or with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go for that matter. And yet, all of these three novels operate, in various degrees, with what seems to have always been a common life principle for many, regardless of the temporal or geographic co(n)text at hand. Dicken’s Hard Times portrays characters who prioritize facts, figures, and material ...

The libretto of Cavalleria rusticana, the well-known opera by Pietro Mascagni, was written by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci, who reduced to melodrama a play by Giovanni Verga, in its turn a dramatization of a short-story with the same title he had previously written. Our investigation focuses on the libretto as a literary text to be analysed in comparison with its prose sources. We propose an in-depth analysis of the similarities and differences between the libretto and the play, in an attempt to un...