All texts read in English translation.
Sex, politics, and religion in Italian literature from the fourteenth to the twenty-first centuries, using various theoretical approaches. Explores the influence of Italian writers on British and American literature. Discuss issues of gender and sexuality, power and coercion, social class and ethnicity. Almost all the texts read have a central focus on the existence or absence of God that shapes the authors’ world views; we will explore these comparatively, reading Dante with T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Petrarch with Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Boccaccio with Keats, and Montale with Hemingway. We will also discuss the authors’ political views and political movements that have shaped Italian and European history, such as Republicanism, Communism, Fascism, and Nazism.
Department: Literature
Location: Florence
Semesters: Fall, Spring
Credits: 3