1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910780575203321

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

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Electronic books.

Italy

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

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 Senilita -- 5. Leading the pedagogue by the hand -- 6. Out of the shadow of the mammoth : Zeno and the story of the other.

Sommario/riassunto

"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 poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist and postcolonial theories, Minghelli provides a close analysis of Svevo's novels and short stories, exploring the construction of self through constant contamination with the world and the other, a process that consciously subverts accepted narratives of evolutionary progress, gender identities, and national and racial belonging."--Jacket

"In this work Giuliana Minghelli examines Svevo's unique contribution



to twentieth-century literature within the framework of his parodic Darwinian fables of the prehistoric encounter between the weak and 'unfinished' man and the incommensurable 'other.' In looking at such novels as Confessions of Zeno and As a Man Grows Older, Minghelli shows how Svevo's fiction displaces the heroic strain in modernism, revealing the self-construction of the subject as an ongoing symbiosis with otherness."