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While many scholars of world literature view national literary traditions as resolved and stable, Kafka’s Italian Progeny takes the fluid identity of the modern Italian tradition as an opportunity to reconsider its dimensions and influencers. Exploring a distinct but unexamined Kafkan tradition in modern Italian literature, it brings Italian literary works into larger debates and reorients the critical view of the Italian literary landscape. The book calls attention to the way Kafkan themes, narrative strategies, and formal experimentation appear in a range of Italian authors. Offering new perspectives on familiar figures, such as Italo Calvino, Italo Svevo, and Elena Ferrante, it also sheds light on some lesser-known authors, including Tommaso Landolfi, Paola Capriolo, and Lalla Romano.Using diverse approaches to explore thematic, generic, historical, and cultural connections between Kafka’s works and those of Italian authors, the author argues for a new view of Italian literature that includes talking animals, parental bonds, modernist realism, literary detective novels, and lyrical microfiction. Whereas Kafka has been mobilized in discourses on minor and world literature, Kafka’s Italian Progeny investigates the particular nature of the Italian reception of Kafka to reveal the richness and variety of modern Italian literature.
Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski is an assistant professor of Italian in Romance Studies at Duke University.
IntroductionKafka, World Literature, and the Italian Literary LandscapeThe Place of Italian Literature in World Literature DebatesKafka’s Italian Reception: An OverviewMorante and Buzzati: Two Cases of Kafka Reception Kafka’s Italian Progeny: An Overview 1. Amerika in Italy: Kafka’s Realism, Pavese, and CalvinoKafka’s Amerika in ItalyThe Italian View of Kafka’s RealismCalvino’s Realist Kafka Amerika and The Path to the Spiders’ Nests: Finding and Losing the Way, All Over Again The Americas of Kafka and Pavese2. Dreams of Short Fiction after Kafka: Lalla Romano, Giorgio Manganelli, and Antonio TabucchiLyrical, Short Kafka Experimenting with Short, Short Works after Kafka The Transformations of Romano, Manganelli, and Tabucchi 3. Processi without End: The Mysteries of Dino Buzzati and Paola CaprioloKafka, Detective Fiction, and ItalyThe Structures of Suspense: Questions, Identity, and HomePrisons of Analysis and the Pull of Imagination4. Kafka’s Parental Bonds: The Family as Institution in Italian LiteratureThe Familial Institution in Kafka and Modern Italian Literature Svevo’s A Life and Ferrante’s Troubling Love: Societal Stress and the Bonds of FamilyLeaving Parental Bonds in Bontempelli’s The Son of Two Mothers and Morante’s Arturo’s Island5. The Human-Animal Boundary, Italian Style: Kafka’s Red Peter in Conversation with Svevo’s Argo, Morante’s Bella, and Landolfi’s TomboItalian Literature, Kafka, and Animal StudiesCommunication across Species: The Monologues of Kafka’s Red Peter and Svevo’s Argo Interspecial Communication: Landolfi’s Châli and Tombo, Morante’s Belli and ImmacolatellaThe Language of Animals and DialectsAnimal Bodies and Christian Spirit in Morante, Landolfi, and BuzzatiEpilogueCalvino’s Kafka and Kafka’s Italy
"Ziolkowski’s innovative research fills a gap in Italian comparative literature and explores the Kafkian tradition in Italy, one that has not been examined up until today."- Andrea Sartori (Annali d’italianistica)