Mario Moroni - Böcker

Italian Modernism was written in response to the need for an historiographic and theoretical reconsideration of the concepts of Decadentismo and the avant-garde within the Italian critical tradition. Focussing on the confrontation between these concepts and the broader notion of international modernism, the essays in this important collection seek to understand this complex phase of literary and artistic practices as a response to the epistemes of philosophical and scientific modernity at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first three decades of the twentieth.Intellectually provocative, this collection is the first attempt in the field of Italian Studies at a comprehensive account of Italian literary modernism. Each contributor documents how previous critical categories, employed to account for the literary, artistic, and cultural experiences of the period, have provided only partial and inadequate descriptions, preventing a fuller understanding of the complexities and the interrelations among the cultural phenomena of the time.

The Italian neoavanguardia, a literary and artistic movement characterized by a strong push towards experimentation, playfulness, and new forms of language usage, was founded at the beginning of the 1960s by a group of poets, critics, artists, and composers. Although the neoavanguardia movement has been primarily defined and examined in a literary context, it is broadly discussed in this collection as also affecting other artistic forms such as the visual arts, music, and architecture.In examining this often controversial movement, Neoavanguardia's contributors include topics such as critical-theoretical debates, the crisis of literature as defined within the movement, and issues of gender in 1960s Italian art and literature. This important collection interrogates the arts as creative codes, their ability to question reality, and their capacity to survive. In so doing, it paves the way for future interdisciplinary investigations of this complex cultural formation.