Canadian Society for Italian Studies

Domenico Pietropaolo

Giuliana Sanguinetti Katz

Antonio Alessio

Giuliana Katz

Pirandello and the Modern Theatre

Vera Golini

Theatre and the Visual Arts

The Performance Text

What were the origins of commedia dell'arte and how did it evolve as a dramatic form over the next two centuries? How did its relationship to the ruling ideology of the day change during the Enlightenment? What is its legacy today? These are just some of the questions addressed in this authoritative overview of the dramatic, ideological and aesthetic form of commedia dell'arte. The book's three sections examine the changing role of performers and playwrights, improvisatory scenarios and scripted performance, and its function as a vehicle for social criticism, to offer readers a clear understanding of commedia dell'arte's evolution in Renaissance Italy. This study throws new light on the role of women performers; its changing ideological discourse, which included social reform and, later, conservatism and the alienation of ethnic minorities in complicity with its audience; and its later adaptation into hybrid forms including grotesque dance and the giullarata typified by the work of Dario Fo. In a commedia dell'arte play, the agents of the dramatic action are stock characters identified by costume, dialect, style of movement, dramatic function and social class, and they are, among other things, vehicles of the troupe's social criticism. A major product of the new entertainment industry of the Renaissance, commedia dell'arte rose quickly to a position of dominance in the European comic theatre. By the middle of the 18th century, it started to practice more genteel forms of humour and to mutate into other genres, such as the Harlequinade, grotesque dance and scripted comedy, becoming in the process an artistic accomplice of the counter-Enlightenment.

The Commedia dell’Arte

Luca Somigli

Dario Brancato

Modernism and Modernity in the Mediterranean World

Mary Ann Parker

The Baroque Libretto catalogues the Baroque Italian operas and oratorios in the Thomas Fisher Library at the University of Toronto and offers an analysis of how the study of libretto can inform the understanding of opera.

Italian Operas and Oratorios in the Thomas Fisher Library at the University of Toronto

The Baroque Libretto

Günter Berghaus

Beatrice Sica

The eighth volume of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies is again an open issue and presents in its first section new research into the international impact of Futurism on artists and artistic movements in France, Great Britain, Hungary and Sweden. This is followed by a study that investigates a variety of Futurist inspired developments in architecture, and an essay that demonstrates that the Futurist heritage was far from forgotten after the Second World War. These papers show how a wealth of connections linked Futurism with Archigram, Metabolism, Archizoom and Deconstructivism, as well as the Nuclear Art movement, Spatialism, Environmental Art, Neon Art, Kinetic Art and many other trends of the 1960s and 70s. The second section focuses on Futurism and Science and contains a number of papers that were first presented atthe fifth bi-annual conference of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM), held on 1–3 June 2016 in Rennes. They investigate the impact of science on Futurist aesthetics and the Futurist quest for a new perception and rational understanding of the world, as well as the movement’s connection with the esoteric domain, especially in the field of theosophy, the Hermetic tradition, Gnostic mysticism and a whole phalanx of Spiritualist beliefs. The Archive section offers a survey of collections and archives in Northern Italy that are concerned with Futurist ceramics, and a report on the Fondazione Primo Conti in Fiesole, established in April 1980 as a museum, library and archive devoted to the documentation of the international avant-garde, and to Italian Futurism in particular. A review section dedicated to exhibitions, conferences and publications is followed by an annual bibliography of international Futurism studies, exhibition catalogues, special issues of periodicals and new editions.

2018

Domenico Pietropaolo

Books

Your next favorite book is out there