“Daisy Miller” e il discorso dell’ideologia

The narrative situation in Henry James's "Daisy Miller" is one that is basic to patriarchal culture: a woman, allowed no voice and point of view of her own, is seen, interpreted, and judged by a male eye and voice placed in an authoritative position. This essay analyses the ways in which textual strategies deconstruct rather than endorse such a situation, by foregrounding the workings of ideology and by undermining Winterbourne's textual authority and, as a consequence, the patriarchal and logocentric thinking of which he is made a representative. In its refusal to provide an authoritative last word on Daisy, the text alligns itself with her active rebellion against that mode of thinking, and with her choice of openness and différence

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributor

Copyright page n. 1

Copyright Pag

“The Coquette” or the Ambiguities: On the Fiction and the Reality of Independence in the New Republic

In The Coquette (1797), Hannah Foster creates the first female individualist in American literature, Eliza Wharton, but places her within the restrictive and punitive confines of a conventional seduction narrative. The heroine's covert manipulation of sexual double-standards emerges as an ill-fated, single-handed fight against larger socio-biological forces, and results in ruin and death. The rhetoric of renunciation in which Eliza's doubtful redemption narrative is couched barely disguises the innovative and disturbing quality of her story

Introduction

Introduction to Henry Roth's Wor

“Silence – A Fable” di Edgar Allan Poe: La lotta fra scrittura del visibile e scrittura dell’udibile

There is no doubt that Poe's writing bears the traces of an excessive compulsion for repetition. The essay analyses "Silence," a short 'fable' written in 1833-35, in which the over-recurrence of repetition mirrors pain, anxiety, awe, and death by dramatizing the conflict between representational and metanarrative concerns. The split between the descriptive and the narrative modes is traced back to the opposition between sight and hearing—an opposition that results in near silence

Il tempo in una stanza: Bid Me to Live di H.D.

Challenging its definition as roman à clef, Camboni reads H. D. 's Bid Me to Live as a "time" novel where Julia Ashton's war-and-love story is the "surface story" of a multi-layered narrative which has at its core the search of a woman writer for identity and recognition. The closed room where most of the story is set functions both as a metaphor of the mind and as the narrative transformation of the symbolic numbers 3 and 4, and their product, 12. In H. D.'s thought, the number 12 stands for cyclic time, which transforms everything and makes the experience of eternity accessible to the human mind. The title, a quotation from Herrick's madrigal "To Anthea," stands for a literary heritage where love and death are always connected, and women are assigned the place of the Muse. By the end of the story Julia, claiming for herself the place of subject and maker of works of art, envisages the possibility that the madrigal becomes the matrix of love and resurrection

The Drunken Scheherazade: Self-Reflection in Jack London’s “The Road,” “Martin Eden” and “ John Barleycorn”

Poole's reading of the London works chosen for their autobiographical interest brings out a complex conflict: hard drinking encroaches more and more on London's workaholic writing, the obsessive 5,000 words a day. The nihilistic and pessimistic truths revealed in his alcoholic stupor give the lie to the false ideals and illusions, such as Socialism, he believes himself to be peddling in his writings. Paradoxically, these falsities, related to female nurture, are life-sustaining, whereas boozing, associated with male camaraderie, expresses a deep death-wish