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Posterity

Inventing Tradition from Petrarch to Gramsci

Reading a range of Italian works, Rubini considers the active transmittal of traditions through generations of writers and thinkers.
 
Rocco Rubini studies the motives and literary forms in the making of a “tradition,” not understood narrowly, as the conservative, stubborn preservation of received conventions, values, and institutions, but instead as the deliberate effort on the part of writers to transmit a reformulated past across generations. Leveraging Italian thinkers from Petrarch to Gramsci, with stops at prominent humanists in between—including Giambattista Vico, Carlo Goldoni, Francesco De Sanctis, and Benedetto Croce—Rubini gives us an innovative lens through which to view an Italian intellectual tradition that is at once premodern and modern, a legacy that does not depend on a date or a single masterpiece, but instead requires the reader to parse an expanse of writings to uncover deeper transhistorical continuities that span six hundred years. Whether reading work from the fourteenth century, or from the 1930s, Rubini elucidates the interplay of creation and the reception underlying the enactment of tradition, the practice of retrieving and conserving, and the revivification of shared themes and intentions that connect thinkers across time. Building on his award-winning book, The Other Renaissance, this will prove a valuable contribution for intellectual historians, literary scholars, and those invested in the continuing humanist legacy.
 

360 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2022

History: History of Ideas

Literature and Literary Criticism: Romance Languages

Philosophy: General Philosophy

Reviews

“An ambitious new intellectual history of Italy that convincingly returns Petrarch and Petrarchism to a position of centrality, this book offers a powerful and generative account of the Italian tradition as a process of ‘tradition making.’ With innovative accounts of such seminal figures as Vico, Goldoni, De Sanctis, and Croce, Rubini demonstrates how, across time, a concern with the shared past has shaped Italian thought and opened new possibilities for the future.”
 

Jurors’ citation | 2022 AAIS Book Prize, first prize for History, Society, and Politics

Posterity should spark an ongoing conversation about the past, present, and future of Renaissance letters, and no doubt its author would find this conversation in keeping with his message.”

Intellectual History Review

“Rubini’s Posterity brilliantly questions the presumption that traditions are retrospectively invented, by instead exploring the control certain Italian writers exerted over their own legacies. . . . Rubini strives not just to comprehend how traditions develop but also to remark on the conscious efforts made to transfer and reformulate traditions across time. . . . A remarkable study.”

MLN (Modern Language Notes)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Whole or Nothing
The Method: Hermeneutics between Gadamer and Betti
The Story: Humanism between Petrarch and Gramsci

One     Primi and Ultimi: Petrarch’s Corpus
Introduction: Total Petrarch, Different Petrarch?
“I was not born to be a slave of my body”: (Re-)writing the Past
Reading the Future
Including the Excluded: Petrarch’s Familiar Invectives
Conclusion

Two     The Purpose of Literary Criticism: Francesco De Sanctis’s (Anti-)Petrarchism
Introduction: Italian Petrarch, (Un-)congenial Petrarch
A Rhetorical Existence
“Going to the people”: Literary Criticism as Moral Philosophy
The Anti-Petrarch
Conclusion: Petrarch as Pharmakon

Three   “Do not grow weary of reading, for I do not grow weary of writing”: Goldoni’s Reform of Italian Literature
Introduction
Enough Is Enough: The Italian Comic Complex
Reforming . . . from Without
“With the mask I’m Brighella, without the mask I’m a man”: Reforming . . . from Within
Conclusion: If Not Molière, Then What?

Four     The Vichian Resurrection of Commedia dell’Arte: Reciprocating Modernity between Italy and France
Introduction
Vico’s Laughter
Giving and Receiving Modernity: A Shared Vichism
“À quoi bon le théâtre italien?”
Conclusion

Five     Remembering Is Not Thinking: Croce, Gramsci, and Italian Intellectual Autobiography
Introduction
Beyond Laughter: For a “Reform” of Italian Thought
“A tall and blond Marx”: Antonio Labriola and Benedetto Croce
Rehearsing the Anti-Croce
The (Auto-)biography of a Nation
Conclusion

Conclusion: The Last Renaissance Man       
                                                              
Index

Awards

American Association of Italian Studies: AAIS Book Prize
Won

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