Gender, Narrative, and Dissonance in the Modern Italian Novel (Toronto Italian Studies) - Hardcover

'A rich and ambitious study... Valisa's book offers a brilliant reading of the modern Italian novel, and it would be fascinating to see a similar approach applied in a comparatist frame.' -- Ann Hallamore Caesar Journal of Modern Italian Studies vol 21:01:2015 'This is a thought-provoking book... Faculties and graduate students focusing on post-feminist theory and the burgeoning field of affect studies will undoubtedly find food for thought.' -- Andrea Sartori Annali d'Italianistica Vol 33:2015

Combining close textual readings with a broad theoretical perspective, Gender, Narrative, and Dissonance in the Modern Italian Novel is a study of the ways in which gender shapes the principal characters and narratives of seven important Italian novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (1827) to Elsa Morante's Aracoeli (1982). Silvia Valisa's innovative approach focuses on the tensions between the characters and the gender ideologies that surround them, and the ways in which this dissonance exposes the ideological and epistemological structures of the modern novel. A provocative account of the intersection between gender, narrative, and epistemology that draws on the work of Georg Lukacs, Barbara Spackman, and Teresa de Lauretis, this volume offers an intriguing new approach to investigating the nature of fiction.