A poem from Les Fleurs du mal is discreetly present both in the conclusion to Fin de partie and the opening of Du côté de chez Swann. This essay examines the nuances and differences in this re-use of a Baudelairian text between Samuel Beckett's play and Marcel Proust's novel.

review, book

The Cronica written by friar Salimbene de Adam from Parma is extremely rich in references to authors and texts. This is the reason why Salimbene de Adam's Cronica is so well-known among medievalists. Indeed, it is an extraordinary source to understand and analyze the reference models not only for the Franciscan culture, but also and above all for friar Salimbene. Like every existential itinerary, Salimbene de Adam's path of life is an expression of personal choices. With its happenings and changings of directions, Salimbene de Adam's existence determined the criteria to select the texts and the authors he quoted in his Cronica . In this sense, the Cronica can be considered a sort of intellectual autobiography .

The talented playwright Martin Crimp, one of contemporary British drama's best-kept secrets, has shaped a singular transtextual territory, also known as Crimpland . Indeed, his output is a cross-pollination of various dramatic styles which fruitfully intermingle. Remarkably, Crimp's corpus reworks the almost entire range of textual transcendences mentioned by Genette: intertextuality, paratextuality, and hypertextuality. Moreover, critics have noted an interesting form of intra-authorial intertextuality in his highly original output. This article focuses in particular on Crimp's hypertextual strategies by examining The Misanthrope (1996), an entertaining rewriting of Molière's homonymous play, and Cruel and Tender (2004), a brilliant contemporary version of Sophocles' Women of Trachis . The analysis of these diegetic transpositions, based on the comparative reading of the hypotext and its hypertext, shows how a plot derived from past dramatic traditions can be successfully transferred into a modern setting, and how such materials can be effective sources for current dramatic reflections on contemporaneity.

review, book

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.

Alfredo Casella composed the two piano collections entitled A la manière de in 1911 and 1914, respectively – the second of them being equally divided with Maurice Ravel. Although these two collections are commonly thought of as belonging to Casella's minor production, they actually reveal an aspect of Casella's personality that cannot be considered as secondary. In the two collections, Casella's stylistic disguise – moulded on the French taste for literary and musical pastiche – guides the composer to mirror himself with his contemporaries and with two icons, such as Brahms and Wagner. In these confrontations, the device of parody hints at more secret issues.

This article examines some sixteenth-century rewritings of the myth of Procne and Philomela, mainly based on the poetic version by Ovid (Metamorphoses): the tragedies by Parabosco, Correr and Domenichi; the translations into Italian by Dolce, Symeoni and Anguillara; and a sonnet by Gaspara Stampa. This analysis aims to throw light on the relationship between each of these texts and their Ovidian roots (with some references to other intertextual strategies present in these works), as well as on the connection between these various texts and the position of these rewritings within sixteenth-century culture, with a special focus on the problem of the representation of the passions.

In some cases, the distinctive features of ancient Greek literary quotations that are used for purely grammatical purposes (brevity, indifference towards content and metrical completeness) can make it difficult to identify the beginning and/or the end of the quotation itself. Thus, the extremities of these quotations end up merging with the surrounding words. Linguistic and stylistic analysis of the quoted author and, in particular, of the quoting author (who is generally less known) can provide the tools to solve this impasse. From this perspective, this article examines the case of a Sophoclean fragment (Soph. fr. 392 R.) quoted by De dictione singulari by Herodian, where the lower limit is difficult to determine.

The relationship between Gadda and Baudelaire originates from an autobiographical identification which immediately leads to a wider ethical reflection on self-consistency. This article thus reconstructs the textual affinities between the two authors to show how the polarities which trap the subject on the edge of dissolution are already present in Les Fleurs du mal and constitute a model for Gadda.