"Critical interest in biography and autobiography has never been higher. However, while life-writing flourishes in the UK, in Italy it is a less prominent genre. The twelve essays collected here are written against this backdrop, and address issues in biographical and autobiographical writing in Italy from the later nineteenth century to the present, with a particular emphasis on the interplay between individual lives and life-writing and the wider social and political history of Italy. The majority of essays focus on well-known writers (D'Annunzio, Svevo, Bontempelli, Montale, Levi, Calvino, Eco and Fallaci), and their varying anxieties about autobiographical writing in their work. This picture is rounded out by a series of studies of similar themes in lesser known figures: the critic Enrico Nencioni, the Welsh-Italian painter Llewellyn Lloyd and Italian writers and journalists covering the Spanish Civil War. The contributors, all specialists in their fields, are Antonella Braida, Charles Burdett, Jane Everson, John Gatt Rutter, Robert Gordon, Gwyn Griffith, Peter Hainsworth, Martin McLaughlin, Gianni Oliva, Giuliana Pieri, and Jon Usher. The volume is dedicated to John Woodhouse, on his seventieth birthday, and concludes with a bibliography of his writings."

Martin McLaughlin

1. Introduction General Issues and Signal Cases 2. The Public and the Private in Modern Italian Literature: The Case of Montale 3. The Battle of the Biographers: Primo Levi and 'Life-Writing' D'Annunzio and Other Fin de siècle 4. Enrico Nencioni: An Italian Victorian 5. Pescara and the Abruzzo in the Imagination of Gabriele D'Annunzio 6. British Material for the Biography of a Tuscan: Llewelyn Lloyd (1879-1949) 7. Italo Svevo: Journalism and the Life of a Writer Self-Images in Fascist Culture 8. Intellectual (Auto-)Biography in Bontempelli 9. Italian War-Correspondents and The Spanish Civil War: Propaganda and Autobiography Autobiographical Strains in Contemporary Italian Writing 10. Concessions to Autobiography in Calvino 11. Umberto Eco: Autobiography into Romance 12. The Dummy Interlocutor and Oriana Fallaci's Self-Projection in La rabbia e l'orgoglio