Rarely, critical readings of Luigi Malerba's work have considered the question of the sources or, more generally, of intertextuality, confirming instead the image of a self-referential author, due especially to his remarkable originality within the narrative survey of late twentieth century. This essay aims to suggest that this self-referentiality should be verified and, at least, partly reconsidered. In fact, whereas on the one hand, Malerba refers mostly to himself, repeating his own themes, scenes, characters, and language, on the other hand, in his works it is possible to find out a wide network of documentary sources, and accurate and provable references to works of other authors, such as Svevo and Pirandello or Borges and Marquez. Also, it is possible to suppose that the author's will to conceal his models is suitable to a precise poetic and answers to a precise idea of the novel function as well.

book review

The quotability of films entails – albeit in different ways – relevant methodological problems both for directors and for scholars. For these reasons, it is important to restrict the range of action of quotations. Moreover, as far as cinema is concerned, it would be suitable to follow Genette's classification (1982). Through the analysis of some movies from the collective opera Chacun son cinéma (2007) and, specifically, through the examination of films shot by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, and Atom Egoyan – this article offers a proposal for the study of some possibilities of quotation in movies.

In the solemn tercets of Paradise , XIV, 85-96, while ascending from the sphere of the Sun to the sphere of Mars, Dante gives thanks to God by making a silent whole burnt-offering to Him. In truth, the text conceals a scriptural echo. In fact, it reminds us of St. Mark's verses concerning the commandment to love God ( Gospel Mk 12, 29-33). Actually, Dante contaminates these verses of St. Mark's Gospel with a passage of the Ecclesiastes ( Ecclesiastes , 35, 1-9). This passage presents a celebration of God's satisfaction for the just's sacrifice. Identifying the inner text, this article focuses on the meaning of Dante's tercets: while entering the sphere of Mars, which – according to The Banquet – “desiccates and burns”, Dante perceives The Holy Spirit Love ( Par. XIV, 67-78) and offers a whole burnt-offering to God, thus moving further to the sphere of Mars.

book review

To a considerable extent, Romantic Orientalist literature is founded on scholasticism, authentication, quotation of antiquarian sources, in other words, on paratext. It constitutes in many respects an oxymoronic, though fascinating and dynamic, symbiosis of repetition / replication and creative imagination / invention. By focusing on Robert Southey's art of quotation in his extraordinarily abundant notes to his orientalist narrative verse this essay seeks to establish paratext as an integral, formative aspect of Romantic Orientalism and Romantic-period poetics, illustrating the hybridity of the Romantic genius and Romantic poetic creation, and challenging common assumptions about a sublime, universal Romantic-period poetry.

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.

This essay aims to examine strategies of quotation in Matteo Bandello's collection of short stories (published in 1554 and 1573). In particular, this article will analyse some passages that explicitly employ fourteenth-century great models (Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio) and some contemporary authors (Castiglione, Machiavelli, Bembo). Indeed, the analysis of the relationship between Bandello's work and the literary tradition reveals contradictory and discordant aspects, such as imitation and censorship, acceptance and parody, obedience to classicism and lively critical sense.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many artists have evoked or rather “surreptitiously” quoted the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili . In particular, this work has incessantly been admired for its thriving iconography, composed of the printing of the tale and its illustrations. This article aims to make a comparison between some specific cases –namely the Victorian artists Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Beardsley, and the surrealist Leonor Fini – of appropriation and reformulation of this source. Indeed, we will try to highlight the different mechanisms of appropriation, interpretation and reuse, thus showing the various meanings that the reference to “Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream” has developed in different cultural contexts.

Twentieth-century Italian literature is deeply rooted in the tradition. This is demonstrated by numerous examples, such as the echo of Gabriele D'Annunzio's tragedy La fiaccola sotto il moggio ( The Torch under the Bushel ) in a famous poem by Sandro Corazzini. Other examples include the presence of Dante's Paradiso ( Paradise ) in Camillo Sbarbaro's verses and the influence of a famous episode taken from I Promessi Sposi ( The Betrothed ) on a poem by Eugenio Montale. Indeed, great Authors' texts are constantly reformulated, modified, distorted, and even reversed. Every time, quotations illustrate how close but also how far that indispensable past is.