The citation, according to Federico Fellini, is a fantasy reinvention that gets only some elements, especially visual, from the memory of a film. The imagination transfigures them with additions, dilatations, creative images and sounds manipulations; this is what happens for the fragment of City of Women (1980): it recalls a fragment of Guido Brignone's Maciste in Hell (1925), transforming it in a new sequence.

book review

book review

The concept of fontes has shown its ever decreasing suitability to reflect the richness and complexity of humanistic literature. In the fontes printed as footnotes is reflected, mechanically and almost physically, the idea of a subaltern and gregarious modernity with regard to classical thought. This article presents a different approach to the study of the humanistic text, based on the identification of cultural genealogies which display all the elements of doctrine that make up a written work at various levels. The work examined is the De republica by Lauro Quirini, a fifteenth-century political treatise in which the author consciously inserts elements of the political thought of the Latin, classical and medieval traditions to an Aristotelian base, adapting such an ensemble to the ideological circumstances of his era.

This article analyses a sequence of Lorenzo Venier's pornographic poem La Puttana errante (about 1530) that offers a parodic version of the episode of Angelica and the hermit in Orlando furioso . After a comparison between the texts, the article suggests that Venier's parody is not a contestation or correction of the illustrious model , but a proposal of a stratified, detached and ironic relation with the sources

Starting from a brief presentation of Giovan Giacomo Ricci's biography and bibliography (still now almost unknown), this paper suggests an interpretation of Ricci's “poema drammatico” Il maritaggio delle Muse , published in Orvieto in 1625. This composition, between the comedy and the “ragguaglio di Parnaso”, is read following the presence and the poetic evolution of the character of Giovan Battista Marino. In the poetical and parnasian structure of Maritaggio , this article underlines its quoting architecture. This paper remarks, in Ricci's drama, Marino's growth from a young love and municipal poet to an able interpret of various genres, from the bucolic to the comic one, up to the long poem.

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Starting from the analysis of the title, Montale's Satura can be compared to some satirical texts written by Roman poets Horace and Juvenal. In particular, the figure of speech of oxymoron is central to the three poets; in fact, each of them uses it to develop a personal axiology, distinguishing value and dis-value: from horatian modus defining virtue like equilibrium between extremes, to the clash between virtus and vitium of Juvenal, up to Montale's “permanent oxymoron”. The latter neutralizes the opposition on which it is based and becomes tautology

Oscar Wilde, “reader of Balzac” in Balzac in English and in The Decay of Lying , as well as in other essays and imagined conversations, tests an especially transgressive practice of quotation, rewriting and rereading both Balzac's self-readings and the readings of Balzac made by other writers, such as Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier and Algernon Charles Swinburne. In this way, Oscar Wilde transforms the manipulation of quotations into a new aesthetic invention. Indeed, by inserting themes and characters taken from the Comédie humaine in his own essays and dialogues, Wilde follows a complex strategy to take possession of Balzac's inheritance and explores the performative power of the “mask”, the systematic use of critical paradoxes, the poetics of “plagiarism” and of “living plagiarism” as “reverse quotation” of Art by Life and vice versa.

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This essay starts by examining the abundant Biblical references in Christopher Marlowe's drama, and especially The Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus . It particularly assesses the degree of fidelity of such references to their source text, as it throws light on the distortions and omissions by which the playwright modifies Holy Scripture to fit his own ends. Subsequently, the essay considers the poetical production of the Modernist author Edith Sitwell, who, in her compositions inspired by World War II, recovers and refashions some significant passages from Marlowe's works. Indeed, Sitwell's verse is a valuable instance of her remarkable skill in awarding new vitality and relevance to words and phrases which she extracts from the literary tradition in order to transform and update them.