Includes bibliographical references. / In this thesis I examine the work of the tum-of-the century Sicilian writer, Maria Messina (1887-1944). Relatively prolific, she received attention from some of the major critics of her day. But her works were forgotten after her death until the early 1970s. Messina's works are significant for their contribution to the understanding of both women's literature and the position of the woman in a patriarchal society during the period of Fascist control of Italy. Although there is growing interest in Messina's works, no full-length study exists which combines a general overview of her writings in their historical and cultural context with an accurate biographical history, which also includes unpublished and rare documents by and on Messina. This thesis fills this gap. All available criticism of Messina's writings, both from the early Twentieth century and from the last twenty years has been taken into account. This comprises the overlooked and forgotten reviews from journals and newspapers as well as the recent German and American ones. The corpus of the known works by Messina has been increased by tracing unknown publications in literary journals of the 1910s and 1920s. Messina's known published correspondence has been increased by the discovery of her unpublished letters to Alessio DiGiovanni, which span the years 1910-40, and those to Enrico Bemporad. The former provide new knowledge of her life, cultural formation and social interaction. The latter serve as documents for her publishing history and her private life in general. A more historically accurate picture of Messina's life and work can now be formed, not only from the unpublished letters but also from the documents and certificates obtained from archives and municipal records. On the strength of internal and external evidence, not previously taken into account, a detailed biography and personality sketch of Messina and an assessment of her cultural and literary formation have now been provided. The literary analysis examined Messina's short stories and novels on a separate basis, while taking into account certain themes which were central to both genres. Rediscovered short stories were found to contribute greatly to a balanced understanding of Messina's subject matter: the tormented mother-child relationship, the dichotomy between greed and need, the ambivalent stance towards love. The analysis of the novels also revealed new insight into Messina's attitude towards the female condition within society. The present feminist-oriented criticism on Messina has tended to overlook her ambiguous representation of the career-woman. Nor has it been aware of the progressive weakening and elimination of the authoritative male figure. These aspects have been seen to be the externalisation of Messina's attitude towards Fascism. In her historical context, on one level Messina appears to accept and transmit Fascism's idealisation of the wife and mother and the glorification of the rural and traditional ways of life. On another level she denounces Fascist doctrine by ridiculing its cardinal symbol of the virile male. While considering Messina's writings as important literary and sociological documents of the condition of the woman in a critical historical moment, the analysis of the text is not oriented from the sole perspective of feminist criticism, which would have been too restrictive. It is instead conducted from a general critical perspective, moving from the texts themselves in order to assess their structural, thematic, stylistic and symbolic components. Research was carried out in the principal libraries of Italy and those in which Messina resided - Rome, Florence, Urbino, Naples, Palermo, Catania, Pistoia - for published and unpublished material written on and by Messina. Searches for biographical information and documents were carried out in all the centres in which Messina lived. Family members and descendents of her friends were contacted. The material obtained was used to compile a biographical history and analyses of her writings.

Excerpt: Multiple new syntheses appeared on the medieval or early modern periods.

When approaching old age, women's bodies face functional, esthetical, and reproductive changes that can represent a source of discontinuity in their lives. Moreover, women are constantly exposed to the social pressure of compelling stereotypes regarding their body image and functionality: from media to medical pamphlets, the feminine body is subjected to deep social observation and regulation. Given that the relationship between ageing and the body is socially mediated, how does the encounter with a different culture have an impact on it? In this research, migration has been employed to analyse the cultural aspects of bodily practices. Migration can be described as an embodied experience, in which a body is first displaced and then emplaced in two social locations - the community of origin and the culture of destination - a circumstance known as transnationalism. Interviews were carried out with women aged between 59 and 74, divided in three groups: RESIDENTS: women who were born in an Italian village and had lived all their lives there; MIGRANTS: women who moved from the same village to London and are still living in England; RETURNED: migrants who moved back to the village permanently after living in London. Four dynamics were identified to regulate the interplay of ageing, bodily practices, and migration: (i) Assimilation: encountering and integrating with the new community; (ii) Acculturation: observing, learning, and sometimes adopting norms and values of the culture of destination; (iii) Acceptance: the binding agent between body and self during the recognition of ageing; (iv) Adjustment: the set of changes in their habits that women put in place in order to accommodate transformations in their bodies and maintain social inclusion. Moreover, a new conceptualization of transnationalism is proposed, which helps to frame how, after many years of negotiation between the culture of origin and the one of settlement, migrants disengage from social normativity, gaining an augmented sense of agency.

The role of women changed constantly during the Renaissance era. Especially notable was the evolution of the role of women within the arts, in which the female gender was becoming particularly sought after. One woman deserving of attention is poetess, philosopher, and musician Tarquinia Molza (1542-1617) who enjoyed notable success at the court of Ferrara. Molza by-passed gender conventions of the day by engaging in traditionally “masculine” activities like philosophy and “feminine” ones such as singing. While there is plentiful scholarship about Molza, no current scholarship has specifically considered how questions regarding the ambivalence of her gender affected Molza’s relationship with her contemporaries. This thesis explores how the notion of masculinity and femininity impacted Molza’s reception among her peers. In order to do so, I examine Molza’s philosophical, poetic, and musical output, before looking at a similarly diverse output from her contemporaries. Though this study does not encompass all of the poetry and musical settings dedicated to Molza, it helps us gain a sense of poetic and musical style, providing the basis for further study. My thesis seeks to further our understanding of the role of women in the northern Italian courts during the second half of the sixteenth century, and strives to examine the links between the gender ambivalence surrounding Tarquinia Molza and her reception among her contemporaries. Moreover, this study sheds light on the importance of gendered rhetoric in late sixteenth-century culture, a consideration that can be further developed and applied to the study of other notable figures.

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This thesis explores the theme of freedom in Goliarda Sapienza's narrative, focusing in particular on three works: Lettera aperta (1967), L'arte della gioia (1998, posthumous) and Io, Jean Gabin (2010, posthumous). The analysis concentrates on the interplay between body and power in processes of identity formation; the main aspects taken into consideration are gender, sexuality and political ideology, with specific attention to the power involved in human relationships. This thesis comprises four chapters. The first three develop a close textual analysis of individual works, each one progressing from the exploration of the internal composition of the self to the analysis of identity in its interpersonal and socio-political dimension. The fourth chapter engages with a comparative analysis of the same works’ narrative structures, accounting for the role of writing in the evolution of Sapienza’s narrative. I identify the pivotal tension of Sapienza's works in the ideal of freedom, and propose to define her narrative as Epicurean and anarchic, characteristics that place it at the intersection of post-structuralist and Marxist-feminist discourses. Overall, I argue in favour of Sapienza's originality and significance within the context of 20^th-century Italian literature. I suggest an affinity between Sapienza's works and the literary legacy of Pirandello and Svevo, as well as certain tenets of postmodern fiction, but also a significant difference, concerning the presence of a tension towards agency and subjectivity, extraneous to the trajectory of the modern and postmodern subject. From a position of marginality and ex-centricity, Sapienza gives voice to a radical aspiration to individual and social transformation, in which writing and literary communication are granted a central role. Her works trace the parable of a strenuous deconstruction of oppressive norms and structures, aimed at retrieving a space of powerful bodily desire, which constitutes the foundation of the process of becoming a subject.

This thesis examines the role of animal imagery in Petrarch's 'Rerum vulgarium fragmenta' (Rvf) as a means of elucidating his poetics in conversation with his predecessors. To achieve this aim, the present study compares and contrasts Petrarch's poetry with that of the poets quoted in Rvf 70, namely Arnaut Daniel, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri and Cino da Pistoia. My research sheds light on the way in which Petrarch draws on and diverges from his precursors as he establishes his poetic language. The comparison between Petrarch and one or more of his predecessors poses three areas of enquiry central to my research: Petrarch's reuse of traditional animal images, such as those in troubadour poetry; the question of allegory in the Rvf; and the language and communication strategies which characterise Petrarch's poetic exchanges. Chapter 1 introduces a theoretical framework, based on the sources in Petrarch's possession, which discusses and reviews the implications, in medieval culture, of the notion of animality in relation to and in the representation of human passions. Chapter 2 considers Petrarch's potential engagement with the repertoire of animal imagery in the tradition of Occitan poetry. It examines the set of zoological images of bestiary derivation that Petrarch shares with the troubadours, specifically focusing on Petrarch's debt to Arnaut Daniel. Chapter 3 explores the role of allegory in Petrarch's animal imagery as compared with Dante's poetry. Chapter 4 considers how the employment of animal images varies between the poems without apparent correspondents and those with specific recipients. The first part of the chapter is concerned with the lyrics of Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia, while the second part analyses animal vocabulary in the Rvf and in the poetic exchanges that Petrarch left uncollected as 'estravaganti'.

This thesis focuses on Intertexuality in the Poetry of Amelia Rosselli from Primi Scritti (1952-1963) to Variazioni belliche (1959-1961). The research is based on the annotated books of the author's personal library kept in the Fondo Rosselli of Viterbo and of her personal documents, letters and original typescripts of her works held in the Centro Manoscritti Autori Moderni e Contemporanei of the University of Pavia. Rosselli's annotations are studied for the first time and they have proved to be essential for the interpretation of her poetry. Rosselli's aspiration to Gesamtskunstwerk is reflected in the composition of her library which ranges from musicology, quantum physics, Gestalt psychology, history of art and philosophy. I explored the influence of these disciplines in her work adopting an interdisciplinary approach. In particular I concentrate on the influence that her studies in etnomusicology have had on the style of her poetry. The theoretical framework of Julia Kristeva and Gian Biagio Conte enable me to draw two main intertexual strategies in Rosselli's poetry: the intertexuality of harmonics, and parody. Rosselli's use of literary allusion is a very original one: it is based on her work as a musicologist, which she articulates in the essay La serie degli armonici. In this essay Rosselli studied natural harmonics in music. Allusions develop into an intertextual fugue creating a mîse en abyme effect. Another type of allusion is the parody in which the poetic I acting as the fool challenges the literary fathers of Tradition in order to find her own space in the canon. The study of intertextuality has also some important consequences on a literary hystoriographic perspective: I recognized in her poetry what Detloff called 'the persistence of Modernism'. Her work like the one of Anglo-American modernists is characterized by a form of resilience to trauma and loss. Like the literature of survivors, Rosselli's deals with the expression of inexpressible, the fragmentation of the poetic I, and the will of re-writing her own story to overcome trauma. The ultimate result is a political and ethical cry for social justice, symphathy and peace.

Le travail de recherche a été articulé autour de trois axes principaux : la lecture philologique et sémantique de l’œuvre de Ippolito Nievo étroitement associée à l’étude de la bibliographie critique ; lʼhypothèse raisonnée de l’existence fondamentale, dans la structure même de lʼœuvre, du principe humoristique et lʼétude systématique de sa problématisation théorique ; le repérage et lʼutilisation méthodique des instruments d’analyse les plus appropriés à une analyse de lʼœuvre articulée sur ces choix. Sʼagissant de la réflexion théorique sur la notion même dʼhumour, elle a démarré sur la base des trente premières années du XXe siècle avec les fameux travaux de Freud, de Bergson et de Pirandello. Par ailleurs, à travers les considérations de Francesco Orlando et de Tzvetan Todorov, l’approche freudienne a été reliée à la linguistique structurale et à la néo-rhétorique de Chaïm Perelman et de Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. Ainsi, l’analyse du premier chapitre des Confessioni a permis dʼétablir une fonction argumentative des phénomènes formels et fondamentaux reconductibles à la notion d’humour et de dégager avec netteté l’importance stratégique de cette partie fondamentale du roman à cause de la présence d’une sorte de koinè qui se manifeste ici presque sans solution de continuité, mais se retrouve cependant dans l’œuvre entière. / This research articulates three main axes: a philological and semantic reading of Ippolito Nievo’s work, which is strictly associated with the study of the critical bibliography; the reasoned hypothesis of the fundamental existence of the humourous principle in the novel’s own structure and the systematic study of its theoretical problematisation; and, the location and methodical use of the most appropriate analytical instruments for an analysis of the novel based on these choices. Theoretical thought about the very notion of humor began during the first thirty years of the 20th century with Freud, Bergson and Pirandello’s renowned studies. What’s more, Francesco Orlando and Tzvetan Todorov’s arguments linked the Freudian perspective to structural linguistics as well as to Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s neo-rhetorics. Thus, the analysis of the first chapter of Confessioni establishes an argumentative function of the notion of humor’s formal and fundamental phenomena. It also clearly reveals the strategic relevance of this fundamental section of the novel through the presence of a sort of koinè that becomes evidently manifest during the first chapter, but it also appears throughout the entire work.

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