Literary criticism

What do Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas have in common? What makes them heroes? What places them at the center of the story? And that charisma they impose on other characters and with which they lend a magnetic appeal to the story, where does it come from? Guido Padano examines the heroic figures of the three great epic poems of Antiquity (Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid) identifying recurring elements and pointing out exceptions, until he draws a character model that is as consistent as it is heterogeneous from time to time.

Between words and things there is an intermediate stage, where words express their inexhaustible tension to become things. The workshop of this impossible, and always retried, metamorphosis is called literature.

If madness is among the great themes favored by Western literature, it is because a disturbing link unites their respective languages: madness and literature both emphasize the image of an isolated individual as opposed to the social group, whether you called him hero or anti-hero; both take the attempt to bring order to the chaos of reality to the point of extreme contradiction; both, through the figural system, disrupt the relationship between linguistic sign and referent.

In Il soprannaturale letterario Francesco Orlando distils twenty years of research, giving a conceptual re-evaluation of the literature in which ‘entities or relationships or events contradict the laws of reality commonly regarded as natural or normal’.

Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination is a monumental work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis. Francesco Orlando explores Western literature’s obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc.). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, Orlando traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialization, when the functional becomes the dominant value of Western culture.

The notion of text is perhaps the most used and discussed within social and human sciences. Nevertheless, it is surprisingly one of the worst defined. Philology and Linguistics, Literary Criticism and Aesthetics, Philosophy of Language, Hermeneutics, Ethnology, Psychoanalysis, Sociology, Semiotics: all these disciplines refer in various ways to the “text”, to make of it the basic object of their analysis or to measure the distance they keep from it. So what does “text” mean? What genealogy does this concept have? Why is there “salvation outside the text”?

In No Island Is an Island an internationally renowned historian approaches four works of English literature from unexpected angles. Following in the footsteps of a sixteenth-century Spanish bishop we gain a fresh view of Thomas More's Utopia. Comparing Bayle's Dictionary with Tristram Shandy we suddenly enter into Laurence Sterne's mind. A seemingly narrow dispute among Elizabethan critics for and against rhyme turns into an early debate on English national identity.

‘To think that two thousand years of history have left their mark on the marble of Rome can be mentally stirring.’ For this reason, investigating the fortune of ancient Rome is a privileged way to understand what made and makes a classic classic.

Homer "pompier", Pausanias' statuary parade, Medea the Rashomonised heroine, effects of reality in Cicero's letters, Seneca's philosophical horror, Plutarch's celebrity couples, Augustine's Confessions on Moana Pozzi's bedside table. These and a hundred other lively readings offer an experiment on the Greek and Latin classics: putting the ancients in constant tension with the contemporary, through a critical style based on figurative flashes and enthusiasm, always crossing the literary with the lived, twentieth-century philology with the tics of the global world.