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6 January 2020

Introduction Kafka, World Literature, and the Italian Literary Landscape

Author: Saskia Elizabeth ZiolkowskiAuthor information and affiliations
Publication: Kafka’s Italian Progeny
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Go to Kafka’s Italian Progeny
Kafka’s Italian Progeny
Pages: 3 - 31
ISBN (Online): 978-1-4875-3380-9
ISBN (Online): 978-1-4875-3379-3
ISBN (Print): 978-1-4875-0630-8

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© 2020 University of Toronto Press. For their own personal use, users may read, download, search, or link to full text UTP books. More information and authorization for use outside of the licensed rights is available at https://utorontopress.com/permissions.

History

Published in print: 6 January 2020
Published online: 29 October 2024

Keywords

  1. Italian literature
  2. Kafka
  3. comparative literature
  4. world literature
  5. literary history
  6. Italian studies
  7. Italo Svevo
  8. Elsa Morante
  9. Italo Calvino
  10. Elena Ferrante
  11. Tommaso Landolfi
  12. Paola Capriolo
  13. Lalla Romano

Authors

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Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski
Biography: Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski is an assistant professor of Italian in Romance Studies at Duke University.
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Introduction Kafka, World Literature, and the Italian Literary Landscape
Kafka’s Italian Progeny. December 2019, 3-31

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While many scholars of world literature view national literary traditions as resolved and stable, Kafka’s Italian Progeny takes the fluid identity of the modern Italian tradition as an opportunity to reconsider its dimensions and influencers. Exploring a distinct but unexamined Kafkan tradition in modern Italian literature, it brings Italian literary works into larger debates and reorients the critical view of the Italian literary landscape. The book calls attention to the way Kafkan themes, narrative strategies, and formal experimentation appear in a range of Italian authors. Offering new perspectives on familiar figures, such as Italo Calvino, Italo Svevo, and Elena Ferrante, it also sheds light on some lesser-known authors, including Tommaso Landolfi, Paola Capriolo, and Lalla Romano.

Using diverse approaches to explore thematic, generic, historical, and cultural connections between Kafka’s works and those of Italian authors, the author argues for a new view of Italian literature that includes talking animals, parental bonds, modernist realism, literary detective novels, and lyrical microfiction. Whereas Kafka has been mobilized in discourses on minor and world literature, Kafka’s Italian Progeny investigates the particular nature of the Italian reception of Kafka to reveal the richness and variety of modern Italian literature.

This book explores Kafka’s sometimes surprising connections with key Italian writers, from Italo Calvino to Elena Ferrante, who shaped Italy’s modern literary landscape.

  • Imprint: University of Toronto Press
  • Published: December 2019
  • Pages: 312
  • epub: 9781487533809
  • pdf: 9781487533793
  • hardcover: 9781487506308

Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski is an assistant professor of Italian in Romance Studies at Duke University.

"Ziolkowski’s innovative research fills a gap in Italian comparative literature and explores the Kafkian tradition in Italy, one that has not been examined up until today."

Andrea Sartori

Annali d’italianistica

"The prismatic effect of viewing modern Italian literature through Kafka in multiple senses – thematic, formal, and as an historical force drawing together dispersed writers – captures a complex literary scene that defies the easy labels of movements and periods. Intervening into an impressive range of critical debates, this book will interest scholars working on contemporary topics including the changing representation of motherhood, animal fiction, detective novels, and the contours of realism and modernism."

Michael Subialka, Department of French and Italian, University of California, Davis

"With an impressive command of scholarship in both German and Italian, Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski engages with a range of debates, from questions of canonization in world literature to genre theory pertaining to detective fiction, realism, and animal studies."

Salvatore Pappalardo, Department of English, Towson University

Winner - 2020 AAIS Book Prize in the category of Literary Studies American Association of Italian Studies