Giuseppe Gazzola
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 0
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Montale, the Modernist explores the historical contingencies and the scientific and philosophical ideas that influenced the composition of Montale's poetry, offering new readings of, among others, 'Non chiederci la parola', 'Arsenio', 'L'alluvione' and 'Dialogo'. Framing Montale alongside such figures as Eliot, Pound, Svevo, Larbaud and Joyce, the book explores the celebrated peculiarities of his poems as modernist innovations, allowing a comprehensive understanding of Montale's role in the lyrical canon of the twentieth century. To recognize Montale's role as a preeminent modernist author also challenges our understanding of modernism itself, not just because it underscores the relationship and the philosophical proximity between Catholic and literary modernism, but because it reorients literary modernism as a truly pan-European movement, originating and distancing itself from the modes of Symbolism after the historic shock of World War I. Considering the arc of Montale's long poetic trajectory, this book traces his evolution from Symbolist to modernist (in 'Ossi di seppia'), high modernist (Le occasioni, La bufera e altro), and finally to a postmodern thinker in the late works (Satura, Diario del '71 e del '72).