Letteratura americana e Rinascimento italiano

Relying upon the critical and methodological perspectives of translation studies, new historicism, and literary sociology, American Literature and Italian Renaissance aims at a transnational reconstruction of the American literary history between the Revolution and the Civil War. This book focuses on the various strategies of adaptation of the Italian Renaissance, seen as a transcultural paradigm within the processes of emergence and development of the American literary field, and across a range of authors including Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Ralph W. Emerson, among others. In so doing, this volume delves into the historical and literary origins of the theoretical pairing between Renaissance and United States, which has been so far limited to the bare critical application – epitomized by F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, along with its scholarly reshaping. The gradual transformation of the historical myth of the Renaissance into a multifaceted literary discourse is surveyed through the close reading and comparative analysis of different texts and works, representative of several literary genres (such as political writing, fiction, poetry, and literary criticism).