This edited collection investigates the relationship between gender and authority across geographical contexts, periods and fields. Who is recognized as a legitimate voice in debate and decision-making, and how is that legitimization produced? Through a variety of methodological approaches, the chapters address some of the most pressing and controversial themes under scrutiny in current feminist scholarship and activism, such as pornography, political representation, LGBTI struggles, female genital mutilation, the #MeToo movement, abortion, divorce and consent. Organized into three sections, "Politics," "Law and Religion," and "Imaginaries," the contributors highlight formal and informal aspects of authority, its gendered and racialized configurations, and practices of solidarity, resistance and subversion by traditionally disempowered subjects. In dialogue with feminist scholarship on power and agency, the notion of authority as elaborated here offers a distinctive lens to critique political and epistemic foundations of inequality and oppression, and will be of use to scholars and students across gender studies, sociology, politics, linguistics, theology, history, law, film, and literature.

«Deeply versed in recent theoretical discussions of the lyric form in general and the elegy in particular, Adele Bardazzi also brings to bear queer thinking on temporality and philosophical treatments of mourning to shift the understanding of Montale’s verse, contesting the division between an early lyrical phase and a later ironic phase. A rich combination of sensitive readings and critical reflection.» (Jonathan Culler, Cornell University, Author of Theory of the Lyric) «In a series of carefully wrought readings of poems in which Montale writes of his lost loves, death, mourning, and his own quite particular vision of the afterlife, Adele Bardazzi both challenges traditional interpretations of Montalian poetic beloveds and offers her own convincing overview of the eschatological dimension of one of the twentieth century’s most essential bodies of verse. A surprisingly fresh take on a much-studied poet, this fine book gives new life to the realm of death in which Montale’s poetry of mourning is so tenaciously rooted.» (Rebecca West, William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Italian, University of Chicago) 　 «Adele Bardazzi’s book offers an original perspective on Montale’s work. The poetics of mourning allows on the one hand to read the text in the light of the theory of the lyric and, on the other hand, to highlight the importance of some figures in Montale’s poetry, through an evocative comparison with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and that of Persephone.» (Niccolò Scaffai, Associate Professor of Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature, University of Siena) 　 This book is as much about the living as it is about the dead. It investigates how the dead dwell in the world of the living and how that continuing relationship has inspired particular forms of poetic writing. It analyses how poetry assumes the key responsibility of voicing grief and thus creates a unique space in which the dead’s presence is sustained, in a constant state of potential transformation and renewal. This monograph explores this topic with reference to one of the most important poets of the twentieth century, Eugenio Montale (1896–1981), and his principal collections, from Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones) (1925) to Quaderno di Quattro anni (Notebook of Four Years) (1977). These primary texts are enhanced by a critical framework that brings three different areas of enquiry into dialogue: scholarship on mourning, theories of the lyric, and feminist approaches. Questions explored include the following: How does mourning become a crucial creative and ethical force in literature? What kind of poetry draws on, and may even require, the presence of an absent female lyric addressee? How does this affect the nature of poetic discourses on mourning and lyric poetry more broadly? This book offers the first comprehensive study of Montale’s poetics of mourning accessible to both scholars in Italian Studies and scholars interested, more broadly, in modern poetry, discourses of mourning, and lyric theory.

Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas and Nostalgia in Post-World War II Italian Culture discusses cultural products-films, poetry, fiction, architectural buildings, autobiographical writing, and social media-to individuate through them the dynamics of memory. The field of analysis is Italian culture from World War II to the contemporary times, and the volume has in a gendered approach one of its focuses, offering an encompassing view on cultural memory and highlighting the similarities between gendered revisitation and revisitation of the past. The volume is divided into three sections: cultural transmissions, fractured memories, and nostalgia. In the chapters herewith the study of memory through these forms hints at a sense of transformation and often enrichment or resilience, individual or collective, that values more the present and the future rather than the past.

This edited collection investigates the relationship between gender and authority across geographical contexts, periods and fields. Who is recognized as a legitimate voice in debate and decision-making, and how is that legitimization produced? Through a variety of methodological approaches, the chapters address some of the most pressing and controversial themes under scrutiny in current feminist scholarship and activism, such as pornography, political representation, LGBTI struggles, female genital mutilation, the #MeToo movement, abortion, divorce and consent. Organized into three sections, "Politics," "Law and Religion," and "Imaginaries," the contributors highlight formal and informal aspects of authority, its gendered and racialized configurations, and practices of solidarity, resistance and subversion by traditionally disempowered subjects. In dialogue with feminist scholarship on power and agency, the notion of authority as elaborated here offers a distinctive lens to critique political and epistemic foundations of inequality and oppression, and will be of use to scholars and students across gender studies, sociology, politics, linguistics, theology, history, law, film, and literature.