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The early eighties saw Italy become a landing bay for thousands of immigrants who abandoned their homes in search of a better life. Almost immediately, Italian academics highlighted the importance of this new phenomenon but tended to emphasize the superficial aspects that all immigrants in Italy had in common, aspects linked to the way of life of the newly arrived immigrants which in essence was very different from the Italian way of life. Soon however, the need for the migrants to be heard grew and La Letteratura della Migrazione was born. This world-wide literary phenomenon manifested itself at a much later date in Italy, compared to other European countries, largely due to the fact that a cultural tradition imposed by colonialism did not exist. Paradoxically, it is this very lack of colonial history that has given Italian migrant writers the freedom to express themselves in a style of literature that is original and primarily spontaneous and in many ways different to other Italian writers. It is against this background that Kossi Komla-Ebri writes in Italian, the language he embraces by choice. Although this dissertation focuses initially on the first African migrant writers, it is primarily a detailed study of the characters in Komla-Ebri’s novel Neyla (2002) and in his collection of short stories All’incrocio dei sentieri (2003). In the broader sense, it explores those themes in his narrative common to migrant literature in general, such as the journey, alienation, otherness, loss of identity and the return home. While it is true that these themes represent universal archetypes present in literature since Homer, the study looks predominantly at how Komla-Ebri’s thematic exposition differs from other works in the same general categories. The study shows how in exploring and expounding the constant divide between two continents and two cultures, Komla-Ebri succeeds with great compassion and humanity not only to bridge the gap between diverse identities, but also to break away from the African/migrant writer category. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008.

The last chapter does not directly concern Poggio, but publishes letters between two of his most bitter enemies, Niccolo Perotti and Lorenzo Valla. They date from the period of the protracted polemics exchanged between them and him (1451-54). An effort is made to characterise the scribe of these letters, and to place him in the context of humanist education. New information on Valla and Perotti is also integrated into their biographies.

The object of the present study is Antonio Pistoia (1436? - 1502), a jocular poet and customs collector who worked mainly in Northern Italy. Although his reputation as a notable literary figure has suffered from neglect in recent times, his work was appreciated by and known to his contemporaries including Pietro Aretino, Ludovico Ariosto, Matteo Bandello, Francesco Berni and Baldesar Castiglione. Research on his life and work came to a halt at the beginning of this century and since then he has failed to attract significant attention. The present study attempts to review and re-examine both the man and his work with a view to putting Antonio Pistoia back on the literary map. My thesis is based on the idea that a poet can be explored from various points of view and with different methodologies tailored to the objects under investigation. In the case of Pistoia a biographical history alone or an interpretation of his work alone would provide only partial results. By combining the two I have attempted to see how he and his work fitted within the cultural scene, the social and historical setting of Renaissance Italy in a period of political and military crisis. Based on archive work and on new textual material retrieved from a number of European libraries, this study challenges and tests widely held theories concerning both his biography and his literary production. By collecting fresh references and winnowing old ones, it throws new light on a series of specific issues from matters of identification relating to the poet's life, the critical fortune of his collection of sonnets, his play Panfila and other minor works, and to problems of uncertain authorship, including poems of undisputed, doubtful and arbitrary attribution; the final section is devoted to his Canzoniere, its composition and the tradition to which it belongs and a thematic and stylistic overview of his poems. A codicological analysis of the allegedly autograph manuscript and a listing of Pistoia's archival documents, manuscripts and early printed sources, completely assembled for the first time and comprehensive of additional new findings, conclude the study.

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This study provides an overview of the literature of the Italian-speaking regions of Switzerland. It presents well-known authors but also lesser-known writers who have made an important contribution to the literature of the Ticino and Grigioni cantons. Dating from the 1960s to the present, the corpus bears witness to a remarkable vitality and innovative spirit, which on occasion overflow political borders and find their way into the much larger Italian market. The dynamism of local publishers has contributed to focusing attention on the high quality and importance of the literature produced by Swiss authors writing in Italian. The distinctive character of this literature lies in the unique combination of disparate factors. Italian language, Swiss culture, and European concerns interact with emotional ties to the local communities in a rich social context marked by past misery and a present characterized by advanced capitalism. / The choice of authors is based on the desire to trace the evolution of narrative literature during the last four decades and present a wide range of themes and styles. In addition to the renowned Giovanni Orelli, this study considers the equally important works of writers such as Alberto Nessi, Claudio Nembrini, Anna Felder, Elda Guidinetti, Silvana Lattmann, Ennio Maccagno, among others. Very young writers whose first efforts are shaping the future of Swiss literature in Italian are also examined. / A special chapter is devoted to women writers. The goal is to identify the style and set of themes which distinguish their contribution from that of their colleagues. The study also discusses the importance of their presence on the literary scene after a time, not so far in the past, when women were confined to writing, in dialect, diaries and letters to relatives who had emigrated. / The discussion of the corpus is prefaced by a detailed presentation of the geographical, social and political context which often determines the literary outcome. The importance of this context has also influenced the way in which the texts are approached. The narratives studied reflect and interpret the problems society was facing at a particular time, as well as the intellectual movements that characterize each period. A chronological presentation of each individual author would have fragmented the dynamic background from which his or her works emerge and within which such works must be located. The name of an author will therefore resurface in different contexts when one of his or her works is discussed in connection with the given period or intellectual movement under examination. The literary history of each author, however, can be easily reconstructed through an attentive reading. What emerges at the end of the study is a widened field of knowledge for Italian studies, whose object can no longer be seen to coincide with the literary production within the borders of the Italian state.

During his fifty-year career, the Italian director Giorgio Strehler (1921-1997) staged more plays by Shakespeare than by any other playwright, but only a few of his most recent and successful Shakespearean productions have received international critical attention, and The Tempest he directed in 1978 is among them. Thirty years before however, in 1948, he directed a first, completely different production of the same text. Starting from the theoretical assumption that a theatre performance, as object, exists only in the moment in which it is actually produced, that is, in its reception by the audience, this dissertation has a twofold purpose: to explore the different contexts in which the two productions directed by Strehler were staged, and to underline how, from the beginning of his career he developed a crucial attention for interpretative techniques culminating in the 1978 Tempest. Aside from being based on the same text and from being produced by the same ensemble, the Piccolo Teatro of Milan, though with two radically different acting and technical troupes, the two productions of The Tempest directed by Strehler enlighten the variety of dynamics – from historical, political, and cultural, to more specifically theatrical, technical, and dramaturgical – which interacted within him while he was working at the staging of the play, and emphasizes the centrality of the director in contemporary theatre. Finally, this dissertation examines how the pragmatic process of rehearsal might modify the director's theoretical approach to a text, and shows how the study of a performance consists not just in the quest for its meaning, but in the investigation of how the text is brought to the stage, to that coalescent point that, in order to materialize, demands active participation and involvement from both interpreters and spectators.

This study seeks to present a philologically accurate and complete edition of Isabella Andreini’s collection of lyric poetry published in 1601. The collection comprises a total of 368 poems: 196 sonnets, 125 madrigals, 6 canzoni, 10 canzonette morali, 2 sestine, 2 epithalamia, 2 centoni, 3 capitoli, 9 scherzi, 4 versi funerali and 9 egloghe boscherecce. The investigation conducted on Andreini’s poems has led us to discover that the variety of metrical structures that make up her collection are perfectly in line with the trends of the century, as confirmed by both Chiabrera’s lyric poetry and the second part of Marino’s Rime. The present study highlights Isabella’s unique poetic personality and her innovative position in literary history. The interpretation of Isabella Andreini’s poetry in the entire thesis revolves around the statement of poetics she makes in the very first poem of the collection. In fact, in her proemial sonnet Andreini declares the non-autobiographical nature of the fervours expressed by her poems, thus declaring that her compositions are simply a poetic exercise. This is made clear further when she states that following her ability as an actress, she wrote in varying style a thousand pages, thus making reference to the variety of styles and metrical schemes she adopted in her poems. Using similar language, she warns the readers of the different narrating voices in the collection, stating that just as on stage she played different parts as woman and others as man, so she did in her poems. It is clear that the special feature of Andreini’s lyrical style is amenable to her talent as an actress, and it was in fact due to her acting skills that she could ably impersonate a man, or conceal the identity of the narrator in her poems, using this ‘invention’ as a key element in her creative process.

This thesis explores mood selection in Old Italian, describing the use of the subjunctive and indicative in complement clauses in non-literary Tuscan of the Quattrocento (1375-1499). Using Wandruszka’s (1991) model of the subjunctive, and a Tuscan corpus of merchant letters and ricordi, sermons and other religious writing, based on Tavoni’s (1992) hierarchy of non-literary Quattrocento writings, I quantitatively assess the factors that influence mood selection in complement clauses. I restrict my analysis to complement clauses so as to compare the findings with those of Stefinlongo’s (1977) and Vegnaduzzo’s (2000) similar corpus-based studies of mood selection in thirteenth-century Italian, where possible, in order to suggest any trends in the use of the subjunctive. While I find that the semantics of the governing lexical element still has the predominant influence on the mood of the complement clause in fifteenth-century Italian, I also find that other factors, such as clause type, person and number, and tense and aspect, have a significant role in the modal outcome of complement clauses. However, the influence of these other factors is neither categorical nor equal, and it may be collective in the case of co-present factors. By conducting a quantitative comparison of mood selection in a variety of text types, my study also investigates Stefinlongo’s hypothesis that subjunctive use is not influenced solely by semantic or syntactic factors but also by features at the level of text type. However, I find the modal influence of text type to be largely indirect, influencing the relative incidence of different semantic contexts which in turn influences the incidence of subjunctive and indicative in a text. The findings of this study serve to inform our understanding of the evolution of the subjunctive in Italian.