Strumenti critici | 2020 | N. 154

This essay investigates the presence of the Bible in Italian Literature by engaging with critical works recently published. If the Bible – Old and New Testament, Hebrew and Christian traditions – is a ‘complete archetypal structure’ (as Northrop Frye wrote), the signs and symbols of this fundamental text, the Book of Books, can be detected in a number of authors, from ancient to contemporary times, from Dante to Giacomo Leopardi and Italo Calvino.

The essay is a tribute to Alberto Arbasino, the great writer recently deceased, as well as a critical review of his work. Arbasino, a very cultured and sophisticated writer, stands out due to his unmistakable and personal style. In short, his style is characterized by a contamination of genres, resulting in an interconnection between, and a blending of, various genres. The main features of Arbasino’s books are typical of both modernism and post-modernism and include the removal of borders between literature, theatre and art, a truly encyclopedic vocation, hybridity, and irony. Arbasino also challenges the separation between high and low culture, hence why every critic and reader should ‘be wary of warning signs’.

The essay analyses the symbolic value of the return of the repressed Celtic element in Arthur Machen’s works in the light of the author’s connections with the English romantic tradition and A.E. Waite’s exoteric doctrines, finally demonstrating how the Celtic heritage provides the author with a subversive tradition endowed with aesthetic, ethical and even logic otherness.

Although they were originally ascribed to the tragedies, for different reasons, both Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline belong to a phase, in Shakespeare’s career, when he mingled the dramatic principles of tragedy and comedy in different proportions, and are ‘problematic’ works in their own way. They do not seem to share much, beyond their similar date of composition, the historical frame, and the presence of the Cydnus scene, re-evoked by Enobarbus in the former ( ii .2.197-233) and described by Iachimo, from a tapestry, in the latter ( ii .4.66-76). The aim of this article is, first of all, to show the existence of other similarities between the two plays, by describing and analysing them; and secondly to suggest that this intertextual dialogue can shed some light on Shakespeare’s reading (and on his audience’s reading) of the story of Cleopatra.

The essay investigates the peculiar meaning of ‘happiness’ in Carlo Emilio Gadda’s oeuvre by taking as a starting point his war diaries and Il Castello di Udine (1934). The philosophical implications behind such a notion emerge clearly in Gadda’s manuscript notes on Epicurus and Leibniz as well as in his 1928 unfinished treatise Meditazione milanese. Two literary works also prove crucial to the development of Gadda’s moral ideas during his years as a student at the Accademia scientifico-letteraria in Milan, namely Giacomo Leopardi’s Operette morali and Hamlet. While Gadda harshly criticised Leopardi’s mindset in a seriesof idiosyncratic notes, the beloved shakespearean tragedy deeply influenced his view of life as the accomplishment of a mission which is worth risking death for.

Through a close reading of Svevo’s and Freud’s works, this essay aims to define the characteristics of a cultural and social discontent rooted in the nineteenth century. A parallel analysis is offered of the last page of La coscienza di Zeno and various passages of Civilization and its Discontent. Svevo and Freud are able to understand and explain a major social contradiction: well-being and civilization are founded on repression and fear; the more advanced a society is, the more it coerces the population to suppress natural drives. Such a comparison is made possible by Darwin’s ideas, in particular by the social re-interpretation of Darwinism in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. For this reason, the essay is also focused on Svevo’s darwinian writings, as well as on a number of short stories such as Lo specifico del dottor Menghi and Una burla riuscita.

Ambra is the original name of the country estate which, at the behest of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was transformed by the architect Giuliano da Sangallo into the splendid Villa of Poggio a Caiano. At the same time, the poetic Laurentian composition rediscovered and transfigured the secrets of Apollo and Daphne by virtue of a hymn to the rustic love of Ombrone and Ambra: an unfortunate love which yields excellent poetic and civil outcomes.