The Poiesis of History: Experimenting with Genre in Postwar Italy [first edition]

Although in recent decades literary theorists have explored the interrelations between narrative and historical discourse, the relationship between history and poetry has remained largely unexamined. In The Poiesis of History, Keala Jewell offers insightful readings of three innovative postwar Italian poets - Pier Paolo Pasolini, Attilio Bertolucci, and Mano Luzi - who, she maintains, have developed a historicized "content of the form" with complex implications for postmodernist poetics and genre theory.Jewell considers the historical dimensions of works by Pasolini (better known outside Italy as a film-maker), Bertolucci, and Luzi in such genres as sepulchral verse, elegy, lament, ballad, the novel in verse, and verse epic. Placing the poetry in its historical and cultural contexts, she shows how it reconceptualizes such pivotal events in twentieth-century Italian history as the agricultural strikes of 1908, the rise of Fascism in Emilia-Romagna, the death of the communist leader Antonio Gramsci, Italy's postwar reconstruction and social upheavals, and the assassination of ex-premier Aldo Moro by terrorist Red Brigades. In the light of the movement away from Hermeticism and Neorealism which has dominated Italian literature since the fifties, she examines the contributions of the three poets to literary and cultural criticism as well as to poetics.This bold and original book will be welcomed by Italianists, literary theorists, comparatists, film historians, and theorists interested in post-modernism, genre studies, and the relations between history and literature.