Between

A field of tensions. Three antinomies for Clotilde Bertoni

Massimo Fusillo — 2026-05-20

This contribution aims at presenting Clotilde Bertoni scientific career as a tension between a more philological and historicist approach and a more dynamic and innovative attitude, which can be compared to Donna Haraway’s diffractive reading. The exposition analyses six key words, organized in three dichotomies, in order to show the complex variety of Bertoni’s relationship with literature and the arts.

Sympoetry. Morphologies of Global Romanticism

Simona Beccone — 2026-05-19

This issue proposes the category of Sympoetry as a framework for rethinking Romanticism from a global and transdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on the Frühromantik notion of Sympoesie, the volume approaches Romantic lyric as a tension-filled field shaped by the paradoxical coexistence of plurality and totality, individuality and collectivity, local identity and transnational circulation. The contributions explore four major configurations of Romantic sympoetry: global poetry, total poetry, poet-ensemble, and symbiosis. Together, they investigate processes of cultural transfer, intermediality, scientific and technological imagination, literary cooperation, female authorship, ecological thought, and the symbolic role of nature across different Romantic traditions. Bringing together scholars working on German, British, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, South American, and Indian Romanticisms, the issue outlines a mobile and relational morphology through which the Romantic movement can be traced in its underlying unity across languages, media, and cultural spaces.

«But I’m wandering –». H.L.V. Derozio’s Poetic Revolution, Dashes and Global Romanticism

Simona Beccone — 2026-05-30

H.L.V. Derozio has often been seen as the «Indian Keats» and an imitative and conventional Romantic poet. However, textual analysis has revealed an extensive use of dashes in all this author’s works, including recently discovered texts. Dashes are used to insert ongoing incidental remarks that emphasise truths not yet recognised by the dominant British and orthodox Brahmin canons of the time, subverting these ideologies and aesthetics. Rather than passively imitating a model, this author then appropriates, transforms, and transcends dominant cultural canons, articulating early nationalistic sentiments in nineteenth-century India and contributing to Indian literary modernity. Derozio’s counter-gaze is notably cosmopolitan, highlighting the transcultural literary scene of the 1820s and 1830s Calcutta that shaped his brief, though significant, career, thus illustrating what Gottlieb refers to as «global Romanticism».

Women sympoetry and “Passeio à Lapa” in Hymnos e Flores. Jornal Litterario

Andrea Bianchini — 2026-05-25

This essay investigates the Coimbra-based magazine Hymnos e Flores. Jornal Litterario (1862-1863) as a pivotal romantic laboratory of “Sympoesia”. By situating the publication within the framework of Schlegelian theory and contemporary debates on global Romanticism, the study aims to demonstrate how the periodical functioned as a “syn-” infrastructure, capable of harmonizing individual poetic voices with collective literary practices. The analysis focuses on the central role of Henriqueta Elysa as both editor and poet, examining three compositions: Desdita, Saudades, and Canção do poeta. The methodology adopts “Sympoesia” as a morphological tool to explore how these texts utilize a shared language of “tears” to establish a relational code. This code connects female sorority and devotional rhetoric with a vast transnational network of epigraphs, including authors such as Lamartine, Balzac, and Hugo. Ultimately, the research illustrates a transition from a sympoesia of the page to a sympoesia of place, exemplified by the “Um Passeio à Lapa” section. It concludes that the magazine re-enacted the Lapa dos Poetas as a site of shared ritual and memory, effectively reconstructing a Coimbran profile of global Romanticism through the lens of a minor periodical.

«Love, hope, and thee, I never can forget!» Mary Shelley Lyrical and Satyrical Poet

Nicoletta Caputo — 2026-05-25

Celebrated by both critics and audiences for Frankenstein, Mary Shelley has often been ignored as an author of lyrical poems. She wrote two mythological blank-verse dramas for children, but, in addition to these, over time, eighteen lyrical compositions have been attributed to her, mostly short and all composed after her husband’s death. Although at first glance these seem to be the result of a retreat into an immense and unbearable grief, which finds expression in themes, images, and words that tend to recur, even after years, in Mary Shelley’s poems, threads connecting them to her entire literary production are discernible. We find, first, her beloved Italy, the author’s homeland of choice. Additionally, political commitment could arguably re-emerge in the 1834 poem Ode to Ignorance, the dubious attribution of which this article intends to investigate.

«The Lion is the Lord of the Desert». Ferdinand Freiligrath and the Limits of Exoticism

Alessandro Fambrini — 2026-05-25

Ferdinand Freiligrath rose to fame in the 1830s with poems set in faraway places that capitalized on the then-popular German literary craze for the exotic. However, despite a long life and writing career, he quickly fell into oblivion. This article seeks to reconnect the threads of his fleeting fame and to reconnect them to the meaning and limits of the exoticism in nineteenth-century culture.

«Move along these shades in gentleness of heart». William Wordsworth, Ecological Empathy, and a Reading of “Nutting”

Laura Giovannelli — 2026-05-25

The aim of this article is to investigate William Wordsworth’s poetics by employing an ecocritical lens that gives due consideration to a complex of significant elements and factors, from the author’s mental growth and proto-ecological awareness to his place-rooted imagination and environmental commitment. Space is devoted to an analysis of Wordsworth’s intimate connection with the Lake District, as well as to pertinent qualities of his Nature poetry, with a careful eye toward landmark studies in Literary Ecology and how they have assessed the Romantic artist’s intellectual and creative production. A close reading of “Nutting”, a short but emblematic narrative poem published in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800), will bring these aspects to light with powerful allegorical resonance. The reading will also facilitate reflection on human/non-human interactions, a state of holistic and healthy cohabitation, eco-caring practices, and the awakening of an ecospiritual consciousness.

“Paintings would transform into poems, poems into music […]”. Poetry as Intersemiotic Translation in Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and August Wilhelm Schlegel

Marta Marchesini — 2026-05-25

This article examines W.H. Wackenroder’s Descriptions of Two Paintings and A.W. Schlegel’s Geistliche Gemählde. These texts are linked not only by their use of poetry to describe pictorial artworks, but also by their placement within collaborative projects shaped by shared authorship and genre hybridization. Although only a few years separate their publication — and despite Schlegel’s near-citational reuse of Wackenroder’s verses — their respective projects attest to a profound divergence. While converging in their shared focus on Italian Renaissance sacred art, the two authors hold fundamentally different conceptions of poetic language. These divergences, grounded in distinct views of the relationship between the arts, are ultimately illustrated through each writer’s specific use of poetic description.

“Where the Sabiá sings.” The nature in the Brazilian Romantic poetry

Sofia Morabito — 2026-05-25

This paper offers an ecocritical analysis of Brazilian Romantic poetry, illustrating how the representation of nature (specifically the sabiá and the palm tree) fulfils a political and symbolic function in the construction of national identity. The study contributes to the debate within the Environmental Humanities through a methodological approach aimed at restoring the centrality of the natural world within the diegetic dynamic and placing its textual and structural function at the heart of the investigation. By applying this perspective to certain poems by Gonçalves Dias, Casimiro de Abreu and Fagundes Varela, the article develops a hermeneutic approach that highlights how tropical flora and fauna therein featured become poetic emblems of Brazil and instruments of cultural emancipation from the colonial model.

Optics and Phantasmagoria in the Poetry of José de Espronceda

Daniela Pierucci — 2026-05-25

This study reads the recurrence of optical, visual, and spectacular imagery in the work of Spanish poet José de Espronceda in light of the “visual revolution” that radically transformed the way reality was perceived and represented between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Espronceda was educated in a context rich in scientific and spectacular practices (optical devices, experimental physics cabinets, and shows based on luminous and phantasmagoric illusions) that characterised this revolution. He then lived in exile in European capitals where these practices flourished. This article aims to show how Espronceda integrated a true visual vocabulary into his poetics, transforming real optical phenomena into metaphors of illusion, instability, and the deceit inherent in existence.

On Mediality of Romanticism. Transcendental Poetics, Optical Devices and the Godwi Case

Francesco Rossi — 2026-05-25

The article explores how, around 1800, the German Romantics redefined poetics as a transcendental, self-reflexive device that transformed literature into a self-reflective medium. More specifically, it highlights optics as a key paradigm for the Romantic imagination, presenting it as a means of mediation – much like a magic lantern – that reshapes the relationship between subject and object, fantasy and reality. In this context, the Romantic novel emerges as an open, digressive, ironic and metaleptic form where reflection and invention converge. In this context, the Romantic novel emerges as an open, digressive, ironic, and metaleptic form where reflection and invention converge. A close reading of Brentano’s Godwi oder das steinerne Bild der Mutter (Godwi, or the Stone Image of the Mother) demonstrates these principles at their limits: breaches of mimetic representation, authorial self-insertion, and a network of optical devices function as metapoetic tools. In Godwi, the “romantic” is compared to a colored, form-shifting glass – giving rise to a theory of form (Gestalt) not as a closed structure, but as a dynamic process – akin to a soap bubble. This leads to a medial reframing Romanticism: representation is constitutively mediated, aesthetics and poetics converge, and form becomes process.

Paola Di Gennaro’s ‘Symbiotic’ Poetry. A Conversation

Paola Di Gennaro — 2026-06-15

This interview with poet Paola Di Gennaro explores several epistemological aspects related to the so-called “sympoetry”: the intersection of literature and science, the relationship between humans and natural/technological environments, the use of collective pronouns as new lyrical subjectivities, genre hybridization.

A preview of the Manifesto for Open Access Public Publishing

Marina Guglielmi — 2026-06-15

This article aims to propose a reflection on OpenUP, the national network of University Presses and Publishing houses of Italian research institutions and their Open Access policy.

The case study proposed is the Manifesto per un’editoria pubblica ad accesso aperto (2026).

Per una psicologia originaria del letterato

Julien Benda — 2026-06-16

This paper presents the first Italian translation of a chapter from Julien Benda's essay La France byzantine ou le triomphe de la littérature pure (1945). This text reflects on the specific mental functions to which literary practice responds, anticipating modern cognitive studies in their search for a specifically literary form of knowledge. According to Benda, the literary writer is intrinsically opposed to the intellectual, from which it is separated by a passion for vagueness and emotionality, for the particular over the general, and for form over content. Benda also identifies the desire to please others as central to the writer's psychology, making literature an essentially social activity. These same drives are seen as foundational to the act of reading; as Benda polemically argues, they find their fullest expression in the “pure” literature of early twentieth-century France, exemplified above all by Stéphane Mallarmé and his disciples.

Simone Giusti, Con la letteratura. La lettura letteraria, la scuola, l’insegnamento

Claudia Cao — 2026-06-15

Review of Simone Giusti's Con la letteratura. La lettura letteraria, la scuola, l’insegnamento.

Bruno Falcetto, Servono per vivere. Per un’educazione all’uso della letteratura

Giulio Iacoli — 2026-06-15

Review of Bruno Falcetto's Servono per vivere. Per un’educazione all’uso della letteratura.

Mario Isnenghi, Autobiografia della scuola. Da De Sanctis a Don Milani

Simone Marsi — 2026-06-15

Review of Mario Isnenghi's Autobiografia della scuola. Da De Sanctis a Don Milani.

John Guillory, On Close Reading

Corrado Confalonieri — 2026-06-15

John Guillory, On Close Reading, With an Annotated Bibliography by Scott Newstok, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2025

Massimo Bonafin, Non più e non ancora. Verso un’antropologia del testo

Cristina Di Maio — 2026-06-15

Review of Massimo Bonafin's Non più e non ancora. Verso un’antropologia del testo.

Julie Hansen, Reading Novels Translingually: Twenty-First-Century Case Studies

Mihaela Frunza — 2026-06-15

Recensione di Julie Hansen Reading Novels Translingually: Twenty-First-Century Case Studies.

Simona Busni, Angela Maiello (eds.) Beyond Catastrophes. Visions and Perspectives on Post-Anthropocenic Italy

Giulio Iacoli — 2026-06-16

Review of Beyond Catastrophes. Visions and Perspectives on Post-Anthropocenic Italy edited by Simona Busni e Angela Maiello.

Giorgio Mariani, Il romanzo americano. Storia, forme, canoni

Donatella Izzo — 2026-06-16

Review of Giorgio Mariani's Il romanzo americano. Storia, forme, canoni.

Simone Carati, Mondi d’avventura. Teoria di un genere romanzesco

Marco Malvestio — 2026-06-15

Review of Simone Carati's Mondi d’avventura. Teoria di un genere romanzesco.

Alberto Sebastiani, Expanded Buzzati. Tra letteratura e fumetto

Simone Marsi — 2026-06-15

Review of Alberto Sebastiani, Expanded Buzzati. Tra letteratura e fumetto, Pisa-Roma, Fabrizio Serra, 2024.

Silvia Albertazzi, Tina. La cultura britannica al tempo di Margaret Thatcher

Pierpaolo Martino — 2026-06-15

Review of Silvia Albertazzi's Tina. La cultura britannica al tempo di Margaret Thatcher.

Alfonso Berardinelli ‒ Matteo Marchesini (eds.), Saggisti italiani del Novecento

Luigi Matt — 2026-06-15

Review of Saggisti italiani del Novecento edited by Alfonso Berardinelli and Matteo Marchesini.

Silvia Albertazzi, Leggere Salman Rushdie

Mauro Pala — 2026-06-13

Review of Silvia Albertazzi's Leggere Salman Rushdie

Nicola De Rosa, Il sangue del regno. Retoriche e ideologie del teatro politico nella prima modernità

Francesco Simoncini — 2026-06-15

Review of Nicola De Rosa's Il sangue del regno. Retoriche e ideologie del teatro politico nella prima modernità.