L'isola dei morti

2006

The Tragic Idea (Duckworth), commissioned for the Inter/Sections series, edited by Paul Cartledge (Cambridge) and Susanna Braund (Stanford)

Configurations, 2017

2013

Fabula de novo homine, 2018

Story originally written in Latin, in which a man refers a dream written in Latin he found by chance on an old manuscript in an old monastery in Germany.

The tragic opening of the Decameron on the devastated urban landscape of a plague-ridden Florence illustrates the crisis of communal institutions, of their moral and religious codes, and of the belief that there existed knowledge capable of understanding and controlling natural phenomena. 1 The plague in the Introduction to Day One can be seen as the "correlative objective" of the crisis of medieval thought, which was founded on the premise of an ontological continuity between human and divine worlds, truth and appearance. 2 Panfilo's conclusion on the impossibility of investigating what is beyond experience in the first novella of the Decameron reveals how deeply the consciousness of this epistemological crisis informs Boccaccio's work. 3 From this new intellectual perspective, the ascertainment of reality becomes problematic. What appears and what actually is become interchangeable realities in terms of the capacity to convey knowledge and understanding, for reality is no longer perceived as a mere sign of the manifestation of the unknown but acquires a value of truth of its own. Fiction and truth emerge as permeable spheres

Ibsen Studies, 2021

Kristin Gjesdal has already published a long series of articles and one anthology on the philosophical impact of Ibsen's dramatic works. With the present volume she delivers a more comprehensive and more deeply analyzed study on the subject that focuses on Ibsen's discussion of the philosophy of history. In the seven chapters of the study, she discusses Ibsen's relation to the aesthetic writings of Lessing and Herder, she debates his ambivalent reactions towards Hegel's aesthetics and philosophy of history, and finally she goes into the complex relation between the attempts by Ibsen and Nietzsche to revitalize modern forms of tragedy. One of the virtues of the study is that Gjesdal not only pays attention to this German context, but also to Scandinavian philosophers who transmitted and modified German philosophy (besides Kierkegaard and Brandes she repeatedly refers to Johan Ludvig Heiberg's philosophical writings). One could, of course, say that all of these complex intertextual relations have already been treated in older studies by Harald Beyer, Ole Koppang, Asbjørn Aarseth, Thomas F. Van Laan, Brian Johnston, and Matthias Straßner (to name just a few important representatives). But Gjesdal is certainly right when she states that the focus of these studies has been "lighter on philosophical content and detail" (p. 8) and heavier on dramaturgical observations. This should not insinuate that she is blind for the literary dimensions of Ibsen's works. On the contrary, all of the presented readings are characterized by an attempt to take drama and the dramatical forms of representation seriously. This

The Poetics of Decadence in fin-de-siècle Italy. Degeneration and Regeneration in Literature and the Arts (Oxford-Berlin-New York: Peter Lang), 2018

This chapter examines the motifs of rebirth and regeneration in fin-de-siècle Italy and their impact on an Italian readership at the turn of the century. It deploys a comparative analysis of three works of foreign literature relating in different ways to the motif of rebirth, namely the play When We Dead Awaken by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, the novel Resurrection by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, and the novel Fruitfulness by the French writer Émile Zola. By examining articles about, and reviews of, these three works in the Italian printed media, I explore both how, and why, Ibsen’s, Tolstoy’s, and Zola’s crucial contributions contrasted with a widespread belief in decadence. I illustrate how an Italian audience interpreted these writers’ understanding of the new century as heralding a regenerative march of progress against the backdrop of Nordau’s Degeneration.