Camilletti, Fabio (2013) Leopardi’s nymphs : grace, melancholy, and the uncanny. Italian Perspectives, 28 . Oxford: Legenda. ISBN 9781907975912 (In Press)

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Abstract

How can one make poetry in a disenchanted age? For Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) this was the modern subject’s most insolvable deadlock, after the Enlightenment’s pitiless unveiling of truth. Still, in the poems written in 1828-29 between Pisa and the Marches, Leopardi manages to turn disillusion into a powerful source of inspiration, through an unprecedented balance between poetic lightness and philosophical density. The addressees of these cantos are two prematurely dead maidens bearing names of nymphs, and thus obliquely metamorphosed into the charmingly disquieting deities that in Greek lore brought knowledge and poetic speech through possession. The nymph, Camilletti argues, can be seen as the inspirational power allowing the utterance of a new kind of poetry, bridging antiquity and modernity, illusion and disenchantment, life and death. By reading Leopardi’s poems in the light of Freudian psychoanalysis and of Aby Warburg’s and Walter Benjamin’s thought, Camilletti gives a ground-breaking interpretation of the way Leopardi negotiates the original fracture between poetry and philosophy that characterizes Western culture.

Item Type:	Book
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts > School of Modern Languages and Cultures > Italian
Series Name:	Italian Perspectives
Publisher:	Legenda
Place of Publication:	Oxford
ISBN:	9781907975912
Official Date:	November 2013
Dates:	Date Event November 2013 Published
Volume:	28
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	In Press
Access rights to Published version:	Restricted or Subscription Access

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