Italian Studies

The Renaissance in Italy continues to exercise a powerful hold on the popular imagination and on scholarly enquiry. This Companion presents a lively, comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and current approach to the period that extends in Italy from the turn of the fourteenth century through the latter decades of the sixteenth. Addressed to students, scholars, and non-specialists, it introduces the richly varied materials and phenomena as well as the different methodologies through which the Renaissance is studied today both in the English-speaking world and in Italy. The chapters are organized around axes of humanism, historiography, and cultural production, and cover a wide variety of areas including literature, science, music, religion, technology, artistic production, and economics. The diffusion of the Renaissance throughout Italian territories is emphasized. Overall, the Companion provides an essential overview of a period that witnessed both a significant revalidation of the classical past and the development of new, vernacular, and increasingly secular values.

Women have had a long and active role in Italian letters. This reference work contains biographical, critical, and bibliographical profiles of 51 writers from the 14th century to the present day. The entries are written by contributors knowledgeable of the historical period in which their chosen writers lived, and reflect both the literary tradition that conditioned their works and the modern gender issues that have shaped contemporary critical interpretation.
For easy reference, the entries in this volume are organized alphabetically and have a uniform format. The first section of each entry is a biographical outline that places primary emphasis on the writer's career and her literary contributions. The second section analyzes recurrent themes, with special regard to the writer's major works. The third section surveys her critical fortune and includes a bibliography, which lists primary works, English translations, and critical studies of the writer. The writers included represent different periods in Italian cultural history and offer the greatest possible variety in women's literary experience.

Embracing the whole of Italian literature, from the early thirteenth century to the present, The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature takes a broad view of what constitutes literature, covering historical writing, travel writing, theatre, and philosophy as well as the novel, poetry, literary dialogues, and critical theory. Providing generous coverage of canonical figures - from Dante and Petrarch to Montale and Calvino - it also contains a wealth of short entries on significant minor figures. The Companion also explores Latin literature written by Italian authors - a major feature of Renaissance culture - and Italian dialect literature; and highlights articles which place the writers and their works in their wider social, historical, artistic, and political context. The 2,400 alphabetically-arranged entries provide clear, up-to-date coverage of Italian literature, making this an essential reference for specialists and non-specialists alike. Written by expert contributors, the entries reflect the current state of international scholarship, which has developed in many different and exciting directions in recent years.

As you browse through Oxford Reference, you may find results that range from short-entry, general reference to more in-depth articles on specialized subjects.

This edition of the only English-language dictionary of Italian literature provides some 400 alphabetically arranged entries on Italian writers, periods, literary movements, and versification, and on critical problems related to literary history. The volume covers Italian literature from the Middle Ages to the present and includes a number of new entries for contemporary writers. The entries, written by expert contributors, include current bibliographical information and have often been updated to reflect new scholarship. Unlike most Italian dictionaries, this book is aimed specifically at the English-language market and provides copious information on English translations as well as a guide to Italian literature in comparative contexts.
Each entry provides a basic identification of the term, followed by a more extensive discussion of the term's background and significance. Appendices trace the chronological development of Italian literature and place it within the larger context of world literature, history, and culture.

The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (English: Biographical Dictionary of Italian People) is a biographical dictionary published by the Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, started in 1925 and not yet completed. It is planned to include about 40,000 biographies of distinguished Italians. The entries are signed by their authors and provide a rich bibliography.

Includes numerous quotations from modern Italian writers since Manzoni with the aim of clarifying the meaning and usage of words.
Accompanied by Dizionari di ieri e di oggi di Luca Serianni.

This dictionary provides clear and concise definitions of the most troublesome literary terms, from abjection to zeugma. Now expanded and in its fourth edition, it includes increased coverage of new terms from modern critical and theoretical movements, such as feminism, schools of American poetry, Spanish verseforms, life writing, and crime fiction.

This rigorously compiled A-Z volume offers rich, readable coverage of the diverse forms of post-1945 Italian culture. With over 900 entries by international contributors, this volume is genuinely interdisciplinary in character, treating traditional political, economic, and legal concerns, with a particular emphasis on neglected areas of popular culture. Entries range from short definitions, histories or biographies to longer overviews covering themes, movements, institutions and personalities, from advertising to fascism, and Pirelli to Zeffirelli.

The Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies is a two-volume reference book containing some 600 entries on all aspects of Italian literary culture. It includes analytical essays on authors and works, from the most important figures of Italian literature to little known authors and works that are influential to the field. The Encyclopedia is distinguished by substantial articles on critics, themes, genres, schools, historical surveys, and other topics related to the overall subject of Italian literary studies.

These two alphabetically arranged volumes cover the major artistic developments in Italy from circa 1300 to circa 1600, a period that marks the Renaissance (or rebirth) of the humanistic spirit of classical antiquity. It is the period in which some of the most famous artists of all time were active, including Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo. Besides biographies on all types of artists, from painters, illuminators, sculptors and architects to printmakers and maiolica designers, patrons and collectors, there are entries on styles such as "all'antica", important art forms such as "cassone", cities such as Siena, Florence, Perugia, Venice and in-depth surveys of all the fine and decorative art forms in Italy during the Renaissance and Mannerist periods.

This reference work, the first of its kind on Italian literature, is a companion volume for all who wish to investigate Italian literary culture and writings, both by women and by men, in light of feminist theory. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for authors, schools, movements, genres and forms, figures and types, and similar topics related to Italian literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and summarizes feminist thought on the subject. Entries provide brief bibliographies, and the volume concludes with a selected, general bibliography of major studies.

The website of the institute of the Italian encyclopedia allows researches among the encyclopedia, vocabularies, synonyms and biographies. Special topics are e.g. "Lingua Italiana", "Biografico" or "WebTv".