Pierpaolo Martino

Laura Giovannelli

Massimo Stella

Elisa Bizzotto

Alessandro Fambrini

Alessandra Ghezzani

Gino Scatasta

Stefano Tomassini

Francesco Bucconi

This issue of Engramma overviews various critical approaches from today’s Wilde Studies in Italy and shows how the author still provides ample space for debate in current Italian culture. The nine contributions span the fields of biography, autobiography, and studies on the self, with special attention to the concepts of self-fashioning and celebrity and pop culture (Gino Scatasta’s Nebbie londinesi e capziose dimenticanze. Wilde lettore di Dickens and Pierpaolo Martino’s Pop Wilde. Oscar Wilde nella popular culture), semiology and visual studies (Massimo Stella’s A labbra aperte: l’Immagine-Ferita di Dorian Gray. A Portrait… a Picture… a Thing?), film studies (Francesco Zucconi’s ‘Rischiare la pellicola’. Nascita del montaggio e fine del cinema in Salomè (1972) di Carmelo Bene”), performance studies (Elisa Bizzotto’s Oscar Wilde and the Rewriting of Medieval Drama and Stefano Tommasini’s “Crazed by the rigid stillness”. Maud Allan danza Salomé), comparative and reception theories (Alessandro Fambrini’s ‘La storia del mondo non è altro che un sogno’. Hanns Heinz Ewers e Oscar Wilde and Alessandra Ghezzani’s ‘Una specie di simbolista’. Borges legge Wilde). Cultural studies, particularly in their spiritualistic approaches typical of the fin de siècle, also offer privileged critical takes on Wilde’s figure and work (as in Laura Giovannelli’s The Ghost as Artist. Allusive Echoes in The Canterville Ghost). What eventually emerges as a shared critical perspective in all these essays is Wilde’s cross-cultural and cross-temporal identity as world literature.

e187 | “Hardly a Christmas present”, Always Present

Roberta Ferrari

Fausto Ciompi

Dealing with the interconnections between music and the written word, this volume brings into focus an updated range of analytical and interpretative approaches which transcend the domain of formalist paradigms and the purist assumption of music’s non-referentiality. Grouped into three thematic sections, these fifteen essays by Italian, British and American scholars shed light on a phenomenological network embracing different historical, socio-cultural and genre contexts and a variety of theoretical concepts, such as intermediality, the soundscape notion, and musicalisation. At one end of the spectrum, music emerges as a driving cultural force, an agent cooperating with signifying and communication processes and an element functionally woven into the discursive fabric of the literary work. The authors also provide case studies of the fruitful musico-literary dialogue by taking into account the seminal role of composers, singer-songwriters, and performers. From another standpoint, the music-in-literature and literature-in-music dynamics are explored through the syntax of hybridisations, transcoding experiments, and iconic analogies.

Laura Giovannelli

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