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For the first time, this book parallels the works of Góngora and Tirso, analyzing their different involvement in the expressive modalities of the Baroque that both interpret and value in a hyperbolic way. With efficiency and originality, the renowned hispanist Laura Dolfi studies the style of Soledades, Panegírico, and Cigarrales, and the artifices of fiction that, in Las firmezas de Isabela and La fingida Arcadia, guide the desenlace, underlining the position of its author with respect to the literary precepts of the time (rejection or acceptance of new art and culteranismo). In addition, Góngora’s role as a playwright is valued, and his plays are studied from less accustomed points of view: the dramatic characteristics, the importance of the rhythm that his verses scanned, the diffusion and the possible corruption of the text.

The death of the self passes through modern culture. However, chooses for himself the role of Psychopomp in obeyance not only to stylistic but also to profoundly ethical reasons. Bassani interrupts his narrative writing to give unity to the Romanzo di Ferrara and to entrust poetry with verses in the form of an epitaph. The testimonial "need” seems to emerge, giving meaning through the Prologue to the Giardino dei Finzi-Contini and to what will come after. It seems that the coherent constructive geometry of an entire work (intertwined since the beginning with refined European readings, figurative and Longhiani memories that Anna Dolfi highlights with wise precision) fully reveals the excess of the hourglass shape, of the conical structures that allow to glimpse distant flakes of light, pushing the real on the perilitant discrimination of the shadow. There, where the existing (objects, characters / people) is offered as a painted image alive only thanks to refraction and indirect projection of the gaze. This book investigates the strategies of Bassani’s memory and his playing on revelation / concealment, while deeply analysing the compositional paths of the texts in their allocative ways (the very privilege, in poetry, of the dialogic and epistolary form). Moreover, the work strongly questions the places of the distance, the introjection of mourning, the relationship between history and truth, between the code of reality and the effect of reality, the convergences between biography and culture (in the names of Caravaggio, Cézanne, De Staël, Morandi, Bacon; Dante, Manzoni , Tommaseo, Hawthorne, James, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud ...), offering a new and suggestive interpretation of Bassani's “writing beyond the heart”.

This book is centred on the work of Oreste Macrí: scholar of Italian, French and Spanish literature; comparatist, metricist, theorist and translator in continual dialogue with Europe; historian and friend of the leading protagonists of the Spanish generation of '25, and in Italy a penetrating and impassioned theorist/founder of Hermeticism. With clear-sighted focus, Anna Dolfi traces the fundamental stages in his critical itinerary, especially on the Italian front, bringing out the singular mix of rigour and creative ingenuity, of philology and impassioned and ineluctable militancy, that is at the basis of an unmistakably new mode of reading the texts, of dialoguing with the authors and with the reader. In a word, what has been defined as 'Macritica', either with playful admiration or with polemical distancing by those who, alarmed by the doctrine, the creativity and the choice of canons, preferred to dwell instead on the difficulty of a language that, confirming over the years Macrì's singular hermeneutic capacity, also fully expressed his provocative nonconformism and his ironic intelligence. Accompanying the book is a precious CD-Rom, outcome of the work of a group of Anna Dolfi's young students (indicated with the initials "GRBM", that is, "Gruppo Ricercatori della Biblioteca Macrí"), which offers a complete index of the private library donated by Oreste Macrí to the "Archivio contemporaneo Bonsanti" of the Gabinetto "G. P. Vieusseux" in Florence. Open CD-ROM

Adelia Noferi (1922-2014) was one the greatest scholars of Petrarch, Bruno, and D’Annunzio and twentieth-century poetry, as well as one of the most refined theorists of the twentieth century and its poetics. This book collects previously unpublished texts, some of which arose from the courses that Noferi taught at university; they reflect with a wealth of doctrine and suggestions on poetry and criticism through Petrarchan readings and an adventurous journey through the topoi of the forest in literature. From the locus amoenus to the labyrinth, the investigation takes place at a structural, formal, symbolic and cultural level and retraces forms and junctions of the imagination through exemplary texts (from Dante to Bigongiari and Zanzotto). The second section, enriched by an iconographic apparatus, collects profiles and testimonies in multiple voices, a biography between generations, and a complete bibliography.

Giorgio Caproni is certainly among the most loved Italian poets of the 20th century. Anna Dolfi used this widespread passion to involve not only well-known scholars of Caproni, but also young researchers, in new research activities. This results in a considerably rich book which, together with an overall vision, offers a series of hermeneutical insights on themes which were not as frequently investigated until then (memory, bestiaries and so on), by combining new readings of exemplary texts with unpublished documents, with reflections on language and poetry, on musical, pictorial and mythical suggestions, never forgetting Caproni’s activity for translation, self-commentary and civic commitment. The book is functionally divided into Percorsi e attraversamenti, Letture (e immediati dintorni), Risultanze tra/dalle carte d’archivio, which enhances the diversity of the critical commentaries and the close comparisons, of the surveys and experiments of comment, of explication de texte, and highlights the great technical skill and the extreme lyrical depth of an author who, between cantability and dissonances, arpeggios and apostrophes, cabalettas and cadences, flourishes and delays, vocalizations and little verses, recoveries and leave, talkativeness and aphasia, was able to interpret the contradictory research, the questions, the fears, the faults and the incurable wounds of our time.

What is the night? How can we define it and mark its edges? The gaze of those observing it is more or less mobile; does the night maintain its function as a frame? How does the difficulty to see clearly favour the artistic invention, the wondering on the infinite and death, the questions on the imaginary, the dream, the memory and the oblivion? Anna Dolfi started from questions like these in devising a book of great novelty and suggestion which, between nocturnes and music, wonders how literature, painting, cinema, opera, popular traditions and songs have narrated about blindness and vision, obsession and fear, or said nights were "tender", desperate, sublime, mysterious and mystical, told about nights of 'sickness', of repairing nights, white nights and sleepless nights, when the attempt is to resist while creating in order to challenge the breaking of dawn. The icon of Mozart’s Queen of night, together with that of Schönberg’s Pierrot, has accompanied about fifty Italian and foreign scholars and young researchers in an almost backlit way; they started from the 18th century and from Ossian's songs, continuing along a European night-themed path supported by theorists (Nietzsche, Bachelard, Jankélévitch...) and music (Mozart, Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, Fauré, Debussy, Britten...), and have worked on Novalis, Hölderlin, German Romanticism, Rilke, Celan, Müller, Hugo, Chenier, Baudelaire , Proust, Cocteau, Bonnefoy and many others, declining the Italian nocturnes from the graveyard elegies of Pindemonte to Leopardi, Di Giacomo, D'Annunzio, Onofri, Campana, Saba, Ungaretti, Sbarbaro, Montale, Penna, Pavese, Gatto, Caproni, Luzi, Bigongiari , Fortini, Jacobbi, Ripellino, Pasolini, Giudici, Rosselli, Sanguineti, De Signoribus, la Anedda, Magrelli and such. The work opens with unpublished Portuguese texts by Ruggero Jacobbi, and with verses and translations of De Signoribus and Vegliante. Starting with Donizetti’s night, the volume comes to the night of different Italian singers and songwriters (De Gregori, Dalla and more), pushing the limit of electric nocturnes which, through poetry, reveal the urban glimpses of a tormented society between the end of the century and the beginning of the millennium.

The Stabat mater, like few other objects of thematics, analyzes the same posture translated into different languages, it tracks the evolution and persistence of a gesture that gives voice to the unacceptability of loss and the immobile duration of pain. From the mères en deuil of the classical antiquity to the fainting of Mary beneath the crucifixions that have marked the history of art - from Jacopone da Todi, from Giotto degli Scrovegni until today, stone and marble reliefs, wooden panels, frescoes, stained glass windows, engravings, tempera, oils, manuscripts, writing, alongside the melodies of Palestrina, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Pergolesi, Boccherini, Rossini - countless works have re-proposed the figure of the grieving mother. In this book we have tried to record the constancy and the alterations of the topos, highlighting the differences that exist between verbal, musical and visual expressions in relation to the changing times, the reversal of the role. If narrative, especially the Italian one, is present with Manzoni, Fogazzaro, D'Annunzio, Gadda, Vittorini, Pavese, Dessí, La Morante, Calvino...; poetry with Gatto, Jaccottet, Szymborska, Merini, Yves Bichet... how intriguing, in this complex volume conceived and edited by Anna Dolfi, is the attempt to move on almost border lands, making the cinema (Pasolini) and architecture speak, making music interact with literature and opera librettos, intertwining soundtracks with celebrated movies, giving figurative models to photography (through the shots by Letizia Battaglia). Poetic texts by De Signoribus and Vegliante, brought back to the theme on this occasion, keep together a research that questions itself on models and typologies, also showing the existence of a further recent role reversal, an unprecedented one, which wants the son’s pietas to pose next to the mother.

“A humanity that forgets Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, I cannot accept it. I write for us to remember”: this was Giorgio Bassani’s answer to anyone who asked him about the origin of his writing. Guided by these words, Anna Dolfi has woven a fabric of suggestions that have pushed Italian and foreign scholars and even some protagonists to reflect on narrators, poets, essayists, historians, philosophers, publishers, artists, who have been induced by the history of a difficult affiliation to a sort of fatal, testimonial moral duty. The result was a book of great novelty for style and reading proposals which, starting from the ancient Jewish tradition, from legends relived in a political and libertarian key, after the Romanticism and the German 19th Century, brings to the fore the modern voices of European and North American literature/culture, and of the Yiddish and Eastern tradition. The names of the great Jewish intellectuals of Central Europe are recurring: Canetti, Schulz, Döblin, Antelme, Wiesel, Sebald, Oz, Grossman, Nelly Sachs, Irène Némirovsky..., among the Italians those of Loria, Natalia Ginzburg, Giacomo Debenedetti, Cesare Segre..., but especially Giorgio Bassani and Primo Levi who, in order to keep the memory of the tragedy of persecution and the Shoah, have chosen to place their entire work “entre la vie et la mort”. Eventually, all this leads to remembering how the duty to testify is linked to the affection and work of mourning, to the lasting effect of an immediate wound that nourishes the connection between the truth of what happened and what one might call the “truth of creation”, le vrai du roman.

This is the first of the two volumes dedicated to Hermeticism and Florence published by Firenze University Press (the second one entitled Luzi, Bigongiari, Parronchi, Bodini, Sereni can be purchased separately). Between 1930 and 1945, a group of young people started one of the most vibrant literary seasons of the 20th century in Florence, known as Florentine Hermeticisms (or simply Hermeticism). Many of its members recognised themselves in a common narrative marked by a shared imagination, and in the silent dissent from the rhetoric of the regime, which was contrasted by the radicalism of the ethical request and by the deep bond with the Jewish-Christian, romantic and symbolist roots of the European civilisation. A hundred years after the birth of its protagonists, there is still much wondering on the nature and definition of Hermeticism, on how it was born, on what distinguished it, on what signs it suffered and left. Searching for how it changed, why it was surrounded by passion, prejudices and aversion (as done by the two essential volumes collecting the documents of a memorable conference in which Anna Dolfi involved scholars from all over the world), leads to draw a portrait of the Hermetic authors, its admirers and/or detractors, and to outline the boundaries and the characteristics of a complex chapter of Italian history which began with Fascism and recently ended with the fall of ideologies. Among masters, companions, followers, the figures of Bo, Macrí, Luzi, Bigongiari, Parronchi, Bodini and of the companion Sereni, stand out for the strength of a suggestive writing experience highly meditative, for all the critic, translation, narrative and poetry genres.

In his theoretical writings Calvino puts forward a suggestive idea, inspired by Borges, of the library not only as a collection of works, but as a crossed system of combinations. Under this light, literature itself would be a library, continuously subject to changes and aimed at undermining the canonical authors in order to bring out the apocrypha. In fact, if it is true that literature is born from desire and feeds on it, it cannot be satisfied with the data, but strives to project itself in the realm of the hidden, invisible and far away reality. Libraries, then, are not only infinite, but they change the sense of a book according to the section in which it is placed, to its location, to the methods of consultation and use, to the way the book plays with spaces and light, to its coming to the light or its being in search for the shadows (books in skyscrapers or undergrounds). The library is a place where books and readers interact in mythical spaces. Libraries are collections of narratives and not only of the books that survived the catastrophes of history, but also of the burned books, of the books which have been lost or invented. Libraries treasure all books which, by the mere fact of having been at least once written or thought, have left their mark in the world. This charming and precious book, conceived and edited by Anna Dolfi, offers examples from the major modern literature, inviting the readers to reflect on the relationship between paper and celluloid shadows, between inconturnables and marginalia, looking for books inside libraries and libraries inside books. In the background the reader will enjoy the music, the brilliant acting of Carmelo Bene, the strips of the graphics, the architectural projects, the computer screens, and the pages of an unfinished novel by Giuseppe Dessí that speaks of a walled up library and of a cascade of books at the origin of a fiction novel.

Unfinished work or interrupted work… It is difficult to find a definition, to identify the theme, to distinguish chance from intentionality. Few 'genres' and / or variations express as the 'unfinished' the same need for what is external to the work and which somehow completes it, bringing the work in a privileged position to create a harmony with our restless modernity. No wonder that in literature, in addition to what has been brutally interrupted, the letters, the diaries, the chronicles of disease and suffering are naturally suspended works. No wonder either that incompleteness accompanies the writings referring to unsolved issues, hidden traumas, silent melancholy. Dictated by choice or by distinct degrees of incapacity, the temptation of the unfinished pursues, urges, deludes its author... The private writings, the sketches, the projects, the papers testify the path necessary for the work to develop and conquer its shape. This book is rich and suggestive and has been conceived and edited by Anna Dolfi. Like its very object, the work is drafted in the perspective of the unfinished and questions some of the many possible examples, along a diachronic arc that goes to literature at figurative arts, theatre, cinema: from Leonardo to Blake, from Ariosto to Stendhal, from Dossi to Gadda, from Kafka to Borges, from Sarraute to Morante, from unknown writers affected by 'cancroregina' to the last Pirandello staged by Tiezzi, up to Fellini of the impossible Mastorna ... At the centre of the volume the readers will find a section with the typescript pages and the unpublished notebooks of / for the work La scelta by Giuseppe Dessí. They lead to the limits of white space, where the chambre claire fixes what is hidden beyond the writing with few, rarefied signs.

On the one hand le côté de Guermantes and on the other that of chez Swann... Few places like Illiers-Combray offer the tangible measure of a myth that has involved not only readers and writers, but also those who have reflected on the meaning and structures of modern fiction. As the great criticism of the 20th century and the most innovative reflections on the method would not be conceivable without the Recherche. Auerbach, Curtius, Spitzer, Poulet, Jauss, Deleuze, Richard, Genette, Barthes…, as well as Solmi, Debenedetti, Contini, and Macchia in Italy, measured themselves with essays and/or memorable books, while Caproni, Fortini, Ginzsburg, Raboni... tried themselves with translation. In short, the seduction of a work with a very dense intertextuality and variety of registers still resides, not only in the ability to talk about the history and culture of the West, offering the grandiose fresco of a universe in decline, but in the possibility of inserting itself on many levels (including that of meta-literature, non-fiction) as an obligatory point of passage. Thus contributing to create a world parallel to the real one, which is now populated by its doubles: cities, cathedrals, feelings, emotions, words intermittences... From the field of fiction to that, induced, of narratology, no doubt that Proust has changed our life, the perception of the world, and the way of looking at objects, and of reading books and things. The collection that is proposed here, designed and curated by Anna Dolfi, gives a broad and evocative testimony, offering itself as an essential object of study on the traces of the unforgettable, unseizable Marcel.

With the 100th anniversary of Giuseppe Dessí’s birth approaching, in 2009, the Committee in charge of the celebrations launched in a widespread dissemination activity of the writer's work in many European countries. And since the translations (the main objective of the project) required a complex knowledge of the author, his style, the dialogue and the difference with the reference culture, it was suggested to study and promote them not only through the reconstruction of the history and typicality of the author’s narrative path, but also through the reconstruction of his scarce reception abroad within the framework, in the case of Dessí, of the presence, outside national borders, of Italian literature in the second half of the 20th century. Through the examination of books, editorial catalogues, magazines, anthologies, and thanks to the commitment of scholars and young collaborators of Italian and foreign universities, it is now France, England, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Finland, Sweden and many more at the centre of the attention, with their reading preferences and aversions, together with Italy, and with the themes, stories, characters of the writer to whom this book is dedicated.

In the first pages of the Zibaldone, Leopardi had noted that the "love of learning" induces a passion for philosophy, making it a foundational element of modern culture. In this perspective, then, no doubt remains as to the prominent position of Voltaire’s Candide, or of Rousseau’s thought, which combines philosophical thinking, educational demands, political passion and autobiography. However, in order to move from the count to the novel, from the apologue and from the treatises to complex characters who also maintain a strong and speculative allure, one had to leave the 18th century, experience Romanticism, feed the rêveries of the new promeneurs solitaires during the following century, with the restlessness and the questions of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Sartre, Camus, and of Pirandello, Proust, Musil and many others; of those who combined the passion for short stories with the unmasking of any deceptive theodicy. Bringing the the novel back to bourgeois intertwining and existential anxieties, starting from Cervantes’s ironic way of thinking. In the absence of declarations, however, where does one find the evidence of the presence of the philosophique in the novel, or how does one identify texts pertaining to the definition of roman philosophique? This book, conceived and edited by Anna Dolfi, does not only raises the problem, but tries to solve it as well. At the same time, it brings the ideas of the novel and from the novel together with constructive theories, and compares the insignificant with significance, mythical emblems and codes, semiosis and destiny, while also observing how language, in the parade of the authors, changes itself and even touches the figurativeness of the graphic-novel. This volume constitutes the final point of arrival of a path which, in samples, locks significant fragments in the otherwise infinite kaleidoscope of narration.