1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910455472003321

Autore

Minghelli Giuliana

Titolo

In the shadow of the mammoth : Italo Svevo and the emergence of modernism / / Giuliana Minghelli

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Toronto, [Ontario] ; ; Buffalo, [New York] ; ; London, [England] : , : University of Toronto Press, , 2002

©2002

ISBN

1-282-02267-9

9786612022678

1-4426-7610-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (251 p.)

Collana

Toronto Italian Studies

Disciplina

853/.8

Soggetti

Modernism (Literature) - Italy

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1. Between Darwinian Origins and Modernist Ends: Svevo's Allegory of Symbiosis -- 2. Of Artists, Women, and Jews: Svevo and the Modernist Contamination -- 3. Between Darwinism and Dreams: The Stories of Alfonso and Annetta in Una Vita -- 4. The Crying of the Statues: Art and Women in Senilità -- 5. Leading the Pedagogue by the Hand -- 6. Out of the Shadow of the Mammoth: Zeno and the Story of the Other -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

The writings of Italo Svevo (1861-1928), who was a pioneer of the modernist novel in Italy, are being revived in both Italian and English. Giuliana Minghelli's In the Shadow of the Mammoth uses Svevo's parodic Darwinian fable of the prehistoric encounter between the weak and 'unfinished' man and an incommensurable other to reassess his eccentric contribution to 20th century literature in works like As a Man Grows Older and Confessions of Zeno. Svevo's fiction displaces the heroic strain in Modernism, revealing the self-construction of the subject as an ongoing symbiosis with otherness.Minghelli situates



Svevo's work in its cultural context, especially in relation to the writings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Otto Weininger, and Italian contemporaries such as Giacomo Debenedetti. Working at the intersection of post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and gender and postcolonial theories, Minghelli performs a series of close readings of Svevo's novels and short stories, exploring the construction of self as a constant contamination with the world and the other, one that consciously subverts accepted narratives of evolutionary progress, gender binarism, or national and racial belonging.