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Starting from a possible allusion to Sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Spiders’ Nest) detected in the first pages of Ventitre giorni della città di Alba (The Twenty-three Days of the City of Alba), this article focuses on the friendship between Beppe Fenoglio and Italo Calvino and their intellectual solidarity in the name of their shared search for an authentic literary representation of the Italian Resistance.

This article aims to throw light on the ways in which Derrida appropriates the device of quotation in an ambiguous and ambivalent text such as Glas. Through an analysis of the formal and textual functioning of literary quotations in Glas, this article aims to demonstrate that the idea of a kind of writing stripped of arché and models is belied by the circulation of hypertexts activating an interplay of echoes and references that can annul any hierarchy of writing.

This essay highlights how Fenoglio contrasts, on the one hand, the world of the resistance movement and, on the other, the world at the end of World War II. The first dimension is described as an “absolute” world, namely something that has taken place; the second dimension, instead, is the world of “repetition”, that is to say something that keeps repeating. This opposition is quite clear both in Fenoglio’s works and in Fenoglio’s literary evolution. Indeed, the writer represents daily life as a form of repetition. This contrast finds also a parallel in the two poets Fenoglio looks at in the post-war years: Hopkins, the partisan’s sublime poet, versus Martial, epigrammatic poet of everyday trifles.

The appropriations of Shakespeare during the Great War are certainly among the most relevant examples of cultural mobilisation of his work. Through the analysis of some misleading quotations, the article examines the use of Shakespeare’s words in propaganda materials, the performance of Shakespearean plays during the war, Francis Colmer’s and Fred Askew’s Shakespearean anthologies, as well as the patriotic role attributed to Shakespeare in the 1916 tercentenary. The aim is to outline the culture of quotation during the Great War, the rhetorical techniques through which propaganda used Shakespearean texts, and the contradictions of such operations.

“Parole rubate. Rivista internazionale di studi sulla citazione” / “Purloined Letters. An International Journal of Quotation Studies”: end of the first series, quotation and plagiarism, amateurism and multidisciplinary approach.

This essay focuses on the strategies of quotation and manipulation, as found in the “Novelle” di Giraldo Giraldi, a fifteenth-century Florentine. Printed in 1796 and enlarged in 1819, Giraldi’s “Novelle” were, in fact, forged by Gaetano Cioni, who published under his name Giraldi’s works. Some of the short stories included in Giraldi’s collection were probably penned by Cioni, while others were taken from Giovanni Gherardi da Prato’s “Paradiso degli Alberti”. Marsilia and frate Macario’s tale is probably Giraldo Giraldi’s only authentic text.

Characters from Greek mythology and echoes from Latin literature permeate English-language verse by Kurdish poet Choman Hardi, who compares the widows of her country to Homer’s Penelope and reworks Catullian motifs to give voice to a people without a homeland. Once again, the cultural heritage of the classics is an effective instrument for representing reality.

Between the 1960s and 1990s, rock music was profoundly influenced by the aesthetic of the American composer and musician, Frank Zappa. The latter’s complex and irrevent quotations came from different kinds of music, which included – among other things – doo-wop, rhythm’n’blues, pop music, as well as commercial jiingles. This article explores Zappa’s musical (and textual) citations of pop art, dadaism, postmodernism and neo-baroque.

Even if Alessandro Tassoni fully translated Justus Lipsius’ “Politicorum libri” a few years after the publication of the princeps edition (1589), critics have frequently diminished the impact of Lipsian thought on his writings. This article aims at refuting this thesis, showing how the “Politicorum libri” permeate Tassoni’s ideas. However, the comparison with Lipsius, characterised by a strong polemical spirit, is not patent. Rather, it develops through a subtle quotation game: in his texts, Tassoni includes various references to Tacit that Lipsius had used to sustain his absolutist, hispanophile and conservative thought, reversing its sense.

While it is important to consider George Eliot’s complex literary genealogy, her fiction can be regarded as an intertextually elaborate appropriation of William Wordsworth’s poetry and ideas on the poet’s role in society. It is no exaggeration to maintain that Wordsworth’s notion of “rational sympathy” was imaginatively absorbed into her entire oeuvre. The many epigraphs Eliot took from Wordsworth’s poems are a testimony to a persistent presence of his works and teachings even in her major phase, when she reached her artistic maturity and world-wide fame.

Introduction

This essay explores Boiardo’s different modes of quotations in his love poetry. Not only does he cite from classical Latin or Italian texts, but he also takes his quotations from the Occitanic or the ancient French traditions. Indeed, in his poems Boiardo includes verbatim quotations, or translates classical texts; at other times, he uses renowned sources and even quotes from his own texts, particularly from the Inamoramento de Orlando. As this study shows in detail, quotations play a crucial role in Boiardo’s poetry.

The paper examines the use of quotes in the collection of tales "La piacevol notte e ’l lieto giorno" (1574) by Niccolò Granucci. The author spans from direct references, often from poetic texts, to rewritings of well-known authors (Ariosto, Boccaccio, Castiglione). There are also some deceptive quotations, whose paternity is consciously misleading. The peculiar way of quoting depends on Granucci’s perception of his sources, which include high literature as well as excerpts merely considered as working materials.

In 467 a. C. the Gallo-Roman poet Sidonius Apollinaris had the assignment to write a panegyric for the new emperor of Western Roman Empire, Anthemius, a noble from Eastern Empire who acceded to the throne after a laborious agreement with the Eastern Emperor Leo. In his panegyric Sidonius overturns the historical reality, imagining in the mythical fiction that the Goddess Rome addresses Goddess Dawn and asks her for Anthemius as a candidate for her throne. By quoting texts of Latin and Late antique writers, Sidonius creates a very impressive passage, that should certainly please the Roman court.

Starting from an accurate analysis of the Classics, especially the Latins, aimed at creating a comprehensive commentary of Poliziano’s vernacular poems, the author has gathered here several quotes which can be considered as unpublished sources for well-known excerpts of famous poets. All the references have been organized by author: Dante, Pulci, Poliziano himself, Tasso, Foscolo, Leopardi.

Mussolini donated the oldest surviving edition of the Orlando Innamorato to the Marciana Library in 1933, after receiving it as a gift. Starting from the possible meanings of this gift, the article shows how Boiardo’s main supporter in fascist culture, Alfredo Panzini, used quotations to revive and correct the legacy of the Innamorato as a novelist, essayist, and lexicographer. While Panzini initially adopted an anti-pedantic form of generative quotation, the surrounding hostility towards Boiardo – and the very nature of fascist culture – turned his quotations into overwhelming (and even fraudulent) rhetorical weapons.

Quotation and remake in film history

In the Soviet Union of the 1960s and 1970s, the culture of opposition created its own language based on quotations, allusions, and double meanings. A good example of the use of quotations is given by the movies of the director Andrej Chržanovskij (1939): while working in the field of animated movies, he speaks to an adult audience able to understand hidden references.

This essay explores one of the least known aspects of Cesare Arici’s (1782-1836) imitation of Virgil. After composing didactic poems and while considering translating all Virgil’s works, Arici set out to write the (incomplete) epic poem "La Gerusalemme distrutta", which imitates the Aeneid both thematically and stylistically.

In his Preface to the American edition of "Dar", Vladimir Nabokov has maintained that the real heroine of his novel is Russian literature. As is well known, the text is fraught with quotations from other literary works. At the same time, poetry plays a crucial role in the text, the protagonist being a young Russian poet. This article analyses how the poems (and their quotations) in the novel have been translated by Nabokov himself in the American edition.

This article focuses on a particular expression from Sophocles’ "Ajax": “with her share of many years”. Referring to and highlighting the old age of Eriboea, the heroe’s mother, this phrase came into fashion in the Byzantine age, as attested by Nikephoros Basilakes, Eustathios Makrembolites, Niketas Choniates, Georges Tornikes, Costantine Manasses, German II and Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos.

The essay analyses the short story "Rasskaz imeni Saši Sokolova" ("A Story Dedicated to Saša Sokolov", 1989) by Andrei Levkin, focusing on its references to the novel "Škola dlja durakov" ("A School for Fools", 1976) by Saša Sokolov. Through this kind of homage, Levkin’s poetics rejects realism and conventional narrative categories.

Giorgio Caproni’s "Il Conte di Kevenhüller" (1986) is replete with allusions and references to Eugenio Montale’s poems: not only does Caproni quote Montale, but he also takes from him the sense of a negative God and of the complexity of the subject.

Introduction

This article aims to throw light on the techniques adopted by the Neo-Latin poet Pacifico Massimi in his "Hecatelegium" (1489) in order to deform his literary materials. These strategies include the parody of themes from Horace and Seneca; the parodic distortion of typical topoi of the language of love; the caricatural doubling of the authorial figure, depicted from opposed and deliberately contradictory angles.

Quotation and Politics

For Paolo Sarpi, the political importance of History lies in its addressing his contemporaries to help them solve the problems of the present. In his writings, from Istoria dell’Interdetto to "Trattato di pace et accommodamento", he draws upon materials from the archives of the Serenissima, reshaping and reorganising them in order to convey the impression of an objective report. His narratives deploy a variety of forms and ways of citing these documents, which enable the text to push the reader in the direction of the author’s suggested interpretation.

Introduction

Exploring the intricate intertextual network underlying Thomas Pynchon’s second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, this article focuses on two musical quotations from Béla Bartók and the Beatles. Both are linked to a tangled web of further references, throwing light on the socio-cultural concerns on which Pynchon’s writing is based, that is to say the interference between Europe and the United States as a consequence of the Second World War, and the banalization of culture due to the increasingly wider networks of global communication.

Rapidly become a literary topos, Ennius’s line utinam ne in nemore Pelio refers to certain events one wished had not unfolded, given the far-reaching consequences they had. In his works, Cicero quotes Ennius’s line repeatedly. Depending on the context, this citation has different functions: it is either used as a means of defence against accusations, or as argumentum longius repetitum in the schools of rhetoric, or as a parodic way to confute Chrysippus’s causal theory.

The paper aims to examine selected Homeric quotations within Lucian’s philosophical dialogues. The Homeric hypotext serves as an instrument for the philosophical satire variously arranged by the author, who explores a wide range of formal solutions in order to integrate the epic text into his own works.

This article offers a classification of various forms and types of intratextuality in Epicurus’ work. Starting from the main distinction between external and internal references to/within a text, this analysis focuses on didactic and argumentative structures as well as linguistic peculiarities. This survey seeks to clarify to what extent the study of self-quotation contributes to the reconstruction of fragmented texts and corpora, but also how Epicurus aims to establish a canon precisely through intra-authorial references.

Introduction to che the Special Issue

For some people quoting is the only way to communicate. In some pathologies, the difficulty in creating declarative clauses can be partially overcome through alternative strategies such as the mechanical and stereotyped repetition of words or sentences spoken by another person. In the past, this phenomenon – known as echolalia – was considered as a deficiency to be corrected. This article explores the debate over the communicative value of echolalia, drawing upon some studies which have demonstrated how imitation can play an essential role in the communication of children with language disorders.

Lazar Ludwik Zamenhof’s poem Ho, mia kor’ (1887), considered the first text ever published in Esperanto, indubitably echoes the themes and emotional climate of Archilochus’ fragment 128 W2. On the other hand, it presents linguistic traces of a re-elaboration, also from a semantic perspective, of the translation of the well-known Shakespearean monologue To be or not to be, on which Zamehof was working while composing his poem.

The question in the title summarizes both contents and aims of this article – the latter investigating if and under what conditions the study of a work’s antecedents can be useful in order to fully understand it. This essay examines a number of examples and cases (starting from ancient Hercules Oetaeus to medieval Scotus Erigena, up to contemporary Arnaldo Colasanti), all aiming to discuss the various phenomenology of sources. It is worth reminding that scholars dealing with literature and poems base part of their research also on aesthetic reasons.

In his passage 2 Timothy 2,19 Saint Paul quotes two passages – or, at least, so he says – from the Old Testament. Yet, while the first citation appears to be an almost verbatim quotation from Numbers 16, 5, the second does not refer to any specific passage. As such, it can be read as a summary of a variety of biblical passages. Philologists and exegetes ought to include this pastoral among Saint Paul’s authentic epistles, as it reflects his typical style and also suggests when, biographically, it was written.

Wajdi Mouawad’s trilogy Le Soleil ni la mort ne peuvent se regarder en face retraces the history of Thebes from its origins to its decadence. With the aim of identifying the deepest reasons which led to the destruction of the legendary city, the dramatist draws upon some of the greatest classical tragedies by amplifying or reworking them, in order to throw light on those characters or features that were overlooked in the hypotext and, for Mouawad, were crucial to understand the inherently tragic condition of man. It is exactly this sense of the tragic that is beautifully summarised by La Rochefoucauld’s maxim after which the trilogy is named.

Review