Perella Midday In Italian Literature

Variations of an Archetypal Theme
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7067-7
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 348 Seiten

Reihe: Princeton Legacy Library

Although midday is commonly associated with indolence or the languishing of both nature and humanity in stifling heat, Nicolas Perella shows that this connection—however real—is secondary to an archetypal encounter with noontide as a moment of existential crisis of spiritual as well as erotic dimensions. First tracing the literary presence of this image from classical and biblical antiquity to Nietzsche and other modern writers, he then analyzes the preoccupation with midday in the imagination of Italian authors from Dante to the present.

When the sun is at its point of greatest strength, the blaze of noon is variously experienced as a wave of glory or a moment of dread, as an occasion for reaching out to the Absolute or retreating from the Abyss, as a source of fullness and energy or of emptiness and lethargy, that ultimately may either expand or annihilate being. The author contends that it is the intimation of crisis surrounding this ambiguous moment that accounts for the richly variegated psychological and aesthetic experience of its imagery in Italian literature.

Originally published in 1979.

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Autoren/Hrsg.

Perella, Nicolas James

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Romanische Literaturen Italienische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter, pg. i
Contents, pg. v
Preface, pg. vii
Introduction, pg. 1
I. From Dante to Pindemonte, pg. 33
II. The Nineteenth Century, pg. 70
III. Gabriele D’Annunzio, pg. 114
IV. Some Twentieth-Century Voices, pg. 145
V. Giuseppe Ungaretti, pg. 201
VI. Eugenio Montale, pg. 240
Conclusion, pg. 263
Notes, pg. 267
Bibliography, pg. 329
Index, pg. 331