In corpore

 

 

 

 

Loredana Polezzi, Charlotte Ross, In corpore: bodies in post-unification Italy, Fairleigh Dickinson, 2007

In Corpore collects essays devoted to the critical exploration of the presence and impact of bodies in recent and contemporary Italian cultural production, in the light of current developments in thinking about bodies and their locations within cultures. The prominent position occupied by the body in Italian culture is at once undeniable and problematic. Dominant perspectives continue to inform a large number of representations of Italy and of Italians, and many of these images are deeply dependent on conceptualizations of bodies, of their roles, functions, and relative positions. Whether we are talking of models of masculinity, of gendered roles within the Italian family or of the infamous cliché of the “bella figura,” the tendency is for such images to produce unified singular interpretations of “Italian culture” and to assign stable locations to “Italian bodies” within it. The essays included in the present volume, on the other hand, assume a plurality of conceptions of “culture” and of “the body.”

Contents

Introduction: Reading Bodies
Loredana Polezzi and Charlotte Ross

Part I: (Im)material Bodies

White, Male and Italian?: Performing Masculinity in Italian Travel Writing about Africa
Loredana Polezzi

Embodied Resistance, Italian Anxieties, and the Place of the Nomad in Colonial Cyrenaica
David Atkinson

Football and Fascism: Foreign Bodies on Foreign Fields
Simon Martin

The X-Ray and the Relic: Anthropology, Bones, and Bodies in Modern Italy
Jeffrey David Feldman

Bodies in Tension in Giacomo Manzu’s Monumento al partigiano/alla Resistenza (Bergamo 1977)
Helen E. Beale

Part II: Literary Figurations

Art, Body, and the Modern Experience in Verga’s Eva
Luisa Carrier

Maternal Shadows: Antonia Pozzi’s Writing of the Female Body
Lindsay Myers

”Destinate a partire”: Contemplating the Female Body from Perfection to Pain in Carlo Cassola’s Paura e tristzza
David Best

Pasolini and the Ugliness of Bodies
Lorenzo Chiesa

Absent and Real Bodies in Tabucchi: From Dissatisfaction to Resolution
Liz Wren-Owens

”Porno-girl da fumetto”: Bodies and Sexuality in the Work of Isabella Santacroce
Charlotte Ross

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index