David Robey

Modern literary theory, a comparative introduction

Russian formalism, Ann Jefferson modern linguistics and the language of literature, David Robey Anglo-American new criticism, David Robey structuralism and post-structuralism, Ann Jefferson reading and interpretation, Ian Maclean modern psychoanalytic criticism, Elizabeth Wright Marxist literary theories, David Forgacs feminist literary criticism, Toril Moi.

The Languages of Literature in Renaissance Italy

In the course of the Renaissance Italian emerged as a national literary language, which was able to compete with Latin and eventually to supplant it as the normal medium of expression in poetry, prose, and drama. Such a major cultural development was necessarily protracted and complex. In spite of the achievements of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, many issues remained unresolved which exercised Italian writers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. How should classical models and ideals of language and style be assimilated into the vernacular? How far should the linguistic fragmentation of the country affect literature? How was the great literature of the Italian past to furnish models for the present? Italian treatment of such problems at a theoretical and practical level was to have a profound and lasting influence on writers in other European languages. This volume consists of sixteen essays by British and Italian scholars on a wide variety of linguistic and stylistic topics in Italian Renaissance writing. It includes studies of general trends, of aspects of major writers (Dante, Petrarch, Alberti, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Tasso), and also of lesser-known figures, some of whom illustrate the diverse possibilities open to writers of the time, whilst others concerned themselves with issues of literary history and evaluation. Working from a number of different angles, the essays cast light on a subject whose importance has been increasingly recognized over the last few decades, but which is still to be thoroughly explored. Students of Italian and Renaissance literature and language, first-degree level upwards.

Humanist views on the study of poetry in the early Italian Renaissance

†must here thank the Small Grants Research Fund in the Humanities (ugc) administered by the British Academy, as well as the Board of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Oxford, for generous grants towards the cost of my research in Italy.

Introduction: New Directions in Humanities Computing

Recent years have seen enormous advances in information technologies, and a corresponding growth in the use of ICT resources for research and teaching in the humanities. How exactly are these developments changing the ways in which humanities scholars work? What new and distinct methodologies is ICT now bringing to the humanities? How do we expect methodologies, and the role of the humanities scholar, to change in the near future as a result of the impact of IT? How are IT-related developments in one discipline affecting, or likely to affect, those in others? These are the issues which the Call for Papers for the ALLC–ACH 2002 Conference encouraged submissions to address, while at the same time welcoming submissions in all the subject areas normally covered by the conference. The programme committee aimed originally to give a special focus to the conference topic in two ways: by organizing separate ‘New Directions’ sessions in the programme; and by holding a preliminary ‘roadmap’ meeting on the topic, the outcome of which would then serve as the starting-point for a final, round-table session at the conference itself. As it turned out, the first of these aims proved impracticable: reviewers were rarely in agreement as to whether a given submission should count as a new direction or not, so that it seemed invidious to attempt to organize separate sessions on the subject (and, for the same reason, the idea of a special Literary and Linguistic Computing issue of ‘New Directions’ conference papers was abandoned). The second aim led to a lively exchange of views at an April meeting in Pisa, hosted by Antonio Zampolli, and attended by most members of the Programme Committee and members of the ALLC Committee (plus the former chair, Susan Hockey). The hope of taking this discussion much further at the round table at the end of the conference proved over-optimistic, however. Despite some interesting contributions, most participants by that stage were probably too exhausted to add much more to the proceedings. Nonetheless the summary of the roadmap discussion is still a potentially useful basis for further thinking, so with various reservations and qualifications I think it is worth presenting again here. The meeting was divided into sessions on:

Italian Studies: the First Half

The first number of Italian Studies was published in Manchester in July 1937. Its editors were Walter Bullock, Cesare Foligno, Camillo Pellizzi, E.R. Vincent, and Kathleen Butler, respectively the Professors of Italian at Manchester, Oxford, UCL and Cambridge, and a Lecturer in Italian at Cambridge who subsequently became Mistress of Girton College. Bullock, who in 1935 had returned to England and the Manchester chair from an academic career in the USA, was General Editor and apparently the main force behind the project (2, pp. 2–9).1 Volumes 1 and 2, with four numbers each, were published in 1937–38 and 1938–39, then the war brought the series to a temporary end. It was restarted in 1946 with Butler and Vincent as editors, Bullock having died in 1944,2 and Foligno and Pellizzi having returned to Italy. Volume 3 appeared in two numbers in 1946 and 1948, when publication was transferred to Cambridge and the editorial board was joined by Anthony Blunt, then Director of the Courtauld Institute, and Roberto Weiss, who took the chair at UCL in 1946. From volume 4 (1949) the pattern of a single number per year was established and lasted until 2004. My aim in this article is to review the character and development of the journal only in the first half of the period since its first publication, partly for reasons of space, more importantly because the halfway point, 1974, marks something of the end of an era. It coincides with the retirement of J.H. Whitfield, a complex and remarkable figure who had played a dominant role in the subject both as chair of the Society for Italian Studies since 1962, and as an editor of the journal since 1951, then senior editor since 1970. It also comes at the end of a period of rapid change in the direction of Italian studies in Italy, with the emergence of a host of new approaches and theories after the decades of dominance by the Crocean critica estetica: a period marked by the foundation of the journal Strumenti critici in 1966 and the publication of works such as Umberto Eco’s La struttura assente (1968), Cesare Segre’s I segni e la critica (1969), D’A. S. Avalle’s L’analisi letteraria in Italia, and Maria Corti and Segre’s I metodi attuali della critica in Italia (both 1970).3 With the gradual introduction of these new approaches in the UK as well, the nature of Italian Studies in the two countries, and their relationship to each other, becomes quite different, a change reflected in the appearance, alongside Italian Studies from 1981, of the new