In this Very Short Introduction, Peter Hainsworth and David Robey consider Italian literature from the Middle Ages to the present day, looking at themes and issues which have recurred throughout its history and continue to be of importance today. Examining themes such as regional identities, political disunity, and the role of the national language, they also cover a wide range of authors and works, including Dante, Petrarch, Manzoni, Montale, and Calvino. They explore some of the distinctive traditions of the literature, such as its liking for theorizing its own position, its concern with politics, and its secular orientation in spite of the Catholic beliefs and practices of the Italian people. Concluding by looking at the ways in which Italian literature has changed over the last thirty years, they examine the influence of women's writing in Italian, and acknowledge the belated recognition of its importance. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

David Obey has in his nearly forty years in the U.S. House of Representatives worked to bring economic and social justice to America's working families. In 2007 he assumed the chair of the Appropriations Committee and is positioned to pursue his priority concerns for affordable health care, education, environmental protection, and a foreign policy consistent with American democratic ideals.
Here, in his autobiography, Obey looks back on his journey in politics beginning with his early years in the Wisconsin Legislature, when Wisconsin moved through eras of shifting balance between Republicans and Democrats. On a national level Obey traces, as few others have done, the dramatic changes in the workings of the U.S. Congress since his first election to the House in 1969. He discusses his own central role in the evolution of Congress and ethics reforms and his view of the recent Bush presidency--crucial chapters in our democracy, of interest to all who observe politics and modern U.S. history.

More than twenty years after its original appearance in Italian, "The Open Work" remains significant for its powerful concept of "openness"--the artist's decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance--and for its striking anticipation of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions Umberto Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.

This entirely new edition, edited for the English-language audience with the approval of Eco himself, includes an authoritative introduction by David Robey that explores Eco's thought at the period of "The Open Work," prior to his absorption in semiotics. The book now contains key essays on Eco's mentor Luigi Pareyson, on television and mass culture, and on the politics of art. Harvard University Press will publish separately and simultaneously the extended study of James Joyce that was originally part of "The Open Work," entitled "The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce," "The Open Work" explores a set of issues in aesthetics that remain central to critical theory, and does so in a characteristically vivid style. Eco's convincing manner of presenting ideas and his instinct for the lively example are threaded compellingly throughout. This book is at once a major treatise in modern aesthetics and an excellent introduction to Eco's thought.

The importance of sound in poetry is indisputable, yet it is not at all an easy subject to discuss, and is rarely treated systematically by literary scholars. This book uses a variety of computer-based processes to construct a systematic analytical description of the sounds of Dante's Divine Comedy in the sense of their overall distribution within the text. The description is developed through a comparative treatment of the same features in a range of related texts, with a view to defining the distinctive characteristics of Dante's practice; and by a discussion of the function and effect of sounds in the work, with special attention to unusually high incidences of particular features. The book is thus both a contribution to the scholarly debate about Dante's poem, and an illustration and discussion of the ways in which new electronic technology can be used for this kind of purpose. Taking advantage of the regularity of Italian orthography, the book begins by using an almost wholly electronic analysis to study the distribution of vocalic and consonantal phonemes and of assonances and alliterations in the text of the Comedy. This is followed by an extensive discussion of the related topic of rhyme, also susceptible of treatment by almost entirely electronic means. The next part of the book deals with rhythmical and metrical structures, and as a result has required a much greater element of manual intervention. A full discussion of syllable divisions in the Comedy and related texts is the necessary first step in the treatment of rhythm. This is followed by a discussion of the theoretical problems involved in the definition of accented syllables in verse, and the formulation a set of principles for resolving them, which are then systematically applied. The outcome is the identification of some distinctive rhythmical tendencies in Dante's work, and a discussion of the effect of certain kinds of rhythmical structure in the poem. The final chapter's contribution is broadly contextual, describing and discussing the theoretical and methodological starting-points - mainly in Formalism and structuralism - of the numerical analysis with which the rest of the book is concerned.

In this Very Short Introduction, Peter Hainsworth and David Robey take a different approach to Dante, by examining the main themes and issues that run through all of his work, ranging from autobiography, to understanding God and the order of the universe. In doing so, they highlight what has made Dante a vital point of reference for modern writers and readers, both inside and outside Italy. They emphasize the distinctive and dynamic interplay in Dante's writing between argument, ideas, and analysis on the one hand, and poetic imagination on the other. Dante was highly concerned with the political and intellectual issues of his time, demonstrated most powerfully in his notorious work, The Divine Comedy. Tracing the tension between the medieval and modern aspects, Hainsworth and Robey provide a clear insight into the meaning of this masterpiece of world literature. They highlight key figures and episodes in the poem, bringing out the originality and power of Dante's writing to help readers understand the problems that Dante wanted his audience to confront but often left up to the reader to resolve. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This is the first comprehensive reference work on Italian literature to be published in English. With 2,400 entries from an international team of scholars, it provides a wealth of clear, up-to-date assessments of Italy's writers, famous and not so famous, from 1200 to 2000, whether they wrote in Italian, dialect, or Latin, together with vital background information on historical events, regional culture, and the other arts.