Italian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

• Introduces Italian literature from the Middle Ages to the present day
• Discusses themes and issues that have recurred throughout history and which are still important today
• Covers a wide range of writers and works, including some of the greatest - Dante, Petrarch, Manzoni, Calvino - as well as others who are less well-known
• Considers the way in which Italian literature has changed over the last thirty years, including the influence of women's writing in Italian
• Does not assume any previous knowledge of Italian literature and is written in a clear and approachable style

Readership: General readers interested in Italian literature, undergraduate students of Italian literature and culture, and graduate students and university lecturers of Italian literature.

Peter Hainsworth, Emeritus Fellow, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and David Robey, Emeritus Professor, University of Reading

Peter Hainsworth lectured in Italian at Hull and Kent Universities before moving to Oxford in 1979. He remained there until he retired in 2003. He has published widely on medieval and modern Italian literature, including Petrarch the Poet (1986). He reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement. His translations of selected works of Petrarch were published as The Essential Petrarch (Hackett Publishing) in November 2010. Peter Hainsworth and David Robey co-edited the Oxford Companion to Italian Literature (2002).

David Robey lectured in Italian at Oxford University before becoming Professor of Italian at Manchester and then Reading University. He has published on 15th-century Italian humanism, language, and style in Dante and Renaissance narrative poetry, and the computer analysis of literature and modern critical theory. He is the author of a computer-based study on Sound and Structure in Dante's 'Divine Comedy' (OUP, 2000), and an extensive data resource on Sound and Metre in Italian Narrative Verse. Peter Hainsworth and David Robey co-edited the Oxford Companion to Italian Literature (2002).

Preface
Introduction
1: History
2: Tradition
3: Theory
4: Politics
5: Secularism
6: Women