Articles by Rosa Mucignat
PEGS
In this paper I argue for a reconsideration of Tasso’s role in the Romantic canon, which I sugges... more In this paper I argue for a reconsideration of Tasso’s role in the Romantic canon, which I suggest depends not only on the legend of his life, but also on the complexity of his epic, and in particular on the crisis in historical consciousness and aesthetic values it represents. Between 1750 and 1850, Tasso was the subject of numerous retellings, from Rousseau’s Confessions to Byron’s ‘Lament of Tasso’. I have chosen two versions of the Tasso story by Goethe and Leopardi, neither of which can be placed squarely in the Romantic field. Goethe’s play Torquato Tasso (1790) was influential in establishing Tasso as a symbol of the Romantic artist in conflict with his environment. However, it does not employ any of the elements that will later become commonplace: the evil tyrant, the various anecdotes of the poet’s madness, and his confinement at Sant’Anna. Leopardi’s ‘Dialogo di Torquato Tasso e del suo genio familiare’ (1824), part of the collection Operette morali, is a surreal dialogue between Tasso and the product of his melancholy thoughts, a ‘genio’ or ‘spirit’ who delivers no Romantic fantasies but harsh materialist truths. Both texts, as I argue, are concerned in particular with temporality and the impact of historical change on poetic forms, social institutions, and character.
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Comparative Literature, 2015
I argue that Italy provided a paradigm to reconceptualize national identity in post-Revolutionary... more I argue that Italy provided a paradigm to reconceptualize national identity in post-Revolutionary Europe: national typing based on immutable factors (climate, psychology) was reformulated in a way that foregrounded history and human agency; and the moral temperament of a nation began to be seen as a factor that affects political transformations.
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Comparative Critical Studies, Jan 1, 2010
A study of the theatre and the house as symbolic loci in which Goethe and Austen present their re... more A study of the theatre and the house as symbolic loci in which Goethe and Austen present their responses to the historical changes brought about by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Domestic and theatrical spaces take on a political meaning, and are used to repudiate revolutionary methods and advocate instead the path of gradual reform.
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Books by Rosa Mucignat
Are minor languages the lifeblood of cherished local identities or just passports with restricted... more Are minor languages the lifeblood of cherished local identities or just passports with restricted validity, serving no purpose in today’s transnational, global world? Italy’s north-eastern region of Friuli is a case in point: in this area, around half a million people speak Friulian, a Romance language of the Rhaeto-Romance family, which is attested to in written texts since 1150 and acquired official minority language status in 1999. Geographically and politically off-centre, Friuli remained isolated for a long part of its history and developed a unique language that sustained a distinctive identity and culture. Starting from the nineteenth century, large-scale migration towards Northern Europe and the Americas brought Friulian into contact with other languages and contexts of use. The Friulian Language: Identity, Migration, Culture is the first comprehensive study in English of this little-known language to consider its history and the variety of its cultural manifestations from antiquity to the present day. The volume gathers together the work of ten contributors who are specialists in the fields of history (Fulvio Salimbeni), law (William Cisilino), linguistics (Paola Benincà, Franco Finco, Fabiana Fusco and Carla Marcato), literary studies (Rosa Mucignat and Rienzo Pellegrini), and migration (Javier P. Grossutti and Olga Zorzi Pugliese). The focus of the book is on Friulian, its varieties, its linguistic characteristics and its use in literature from fourteenth-century ballads to Pier Paolo Pasolini, and more recent poetry by Novella Cantarutti and others. Equal attention is given to the Friulians themselves, the social and political transformations of the region, and the experience of migration, in particular the case of high-skilled mosaic craftsmen from the Alpine foothills. Thanks to its multidisciplinary approach, the book sheds light on the questions of why Friulian has developed the way it has, what its significance as a minor language is, and how it can negotiate its relationship to other languages on a global scale.
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Posing new questions about realism and the creative power of narratives, Rosa Mucignat takes a fr... more Posing new questions about realism and the creative power of narratives, Rosa Mucignat takes a fresh look at the relationship between representation and reality. As Mucignat points out, worlds evoked in fiction all depend to a greater or lesser extent on the world we know from experience, but they are neither parasites on nor copies of those realms. Never fully aligned with the real world, stories grow out of the mismatch between reality and representation-those areas of the fictional space that are not located on actual maps, but still form a fully structured imagined geography. Mucignat offers new readings of six foundational texts of modern Western culture: Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed, Stendahl'ss The Red and the Black, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, and Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education. Using these texts as source material and supporting evidence for a new and comprehensive theory of space in fiction, she examines the links between the nineteenth-century novel's interest in creating substantial, life-like worlds and contemporary developments in science, art, and society. Mucignat's book is an evocative analysis of the way novels marshal their technical and stylistic resources to produce imagined geographies so complex and engrossing that they intensify and even transform the reader's experience of real-life places.
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Book Chapters by Rosa Mucignat
Byron: The Poetry of Politics and the Politics of Poetry, ed. Roderick Beaton and Christine Kenyon Jones , 2015
‘Beautiful, but scarred and paralysed, battered by forces beyond its control, but seemingly incap... more ‘Beautiful, but scarred and paralysed, battered by forces beyond its control, but seemingly incapable of resurrecting itself’: this is how a British observer describes the political situation of Italy – but not in the nineteenth century. This evocative portrayal is part of a commentary on the 2013 election published on the Guardian newspaper shortly before the vote. The image of Italy that still dominates the public discourse today is modeled on a set of ideas that emerged in the fifty years leading to the unification of 1861. In this period, the uncertain fate of the Italian peninsula became the object of intense emotional and intellectual investment for radical thinkers across Europe. This essay considers the extent to which the unpredictable course of Italian politics, constantly oscillating between a seemingly irreversible process of decay and utopian promises of regeneration, are reflected in writing by Byron and Foscolo. In particular, it analyses how both poets sought to intervene in the discussion about Italy’s future by talking about its past. Prophecy is a recurring feature in both poet’s works, most notably in Byron’s The Prophecy of Dante (1819), and in Foscolo’s Dei sepolcri (1807). I analyse how prophetic speech is used in these poems to mobilize Italy’s past in the service of Risorgimento and revolution. I also consider to what extent the ancient repertoire of religious and poetic vaticination becomes the vehicle for a new kind of historical thinking, following post-Enlightenment developments in the philosophy of history.
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The Friulian Language: Identity, Migration, Culture
I reassess the novel in the light of Marx’s ideas about the psychology of oppressed peoples (to w... more I reassess the novel in the light of Marx’s ideas about the psychology of oppressed peoples (to which the title allude). The ‘dreamers’ are the Friulian peasantry, and their dream is emancipation and material wellbeing. Despite being written in standard Italian, Il sogno is arguably the work in which Pasolini engaged most closely with the social and historical realities in which the Friulian language existed. The novel testifies to the continuity Pasolini saw between linguistic concerns and political action – a discovery he made in Friuli and, I argue, shaped his engagement with other peripheries in Italy and beyond.
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Deceit, Desire and the Novel Fifty Years Later: Mimetic Theory and Literary Studies
This essay tests Girard's theory of mimetic desire through a space-based interpretation of interp... more This essay tests Girard's theory of mimetic desire through a space-based interpretation of interpersonal relations in a classic realist novel (Flaubert) and a world novel (Pamuk). While most theories of world literature are dependent on economical models of circulations (Moretti, Damrosch), this paper argues that the space of the provincial novel is produced by emotions and affect (admiration, jealousy, desire, antagonism).
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La storia e la scienza dell’antico. Lo stile dei classicisti italiani nel Ventesimo Secolo
This is a study of the intellectual heritage and impact of refugee scholars from continental Euro... more This is a study of the intellectual heritage and impact of refugee scholars from continental Europe on British academia. It focuses on Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano, whose emphasis on ‘live’ scholarly exchange revolutionized the study of the ancient world in the UK.
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Recognition and Modes of Knowledge: Anagnorisis from Antiquity to Contemporary Theory, ed. by Teresa G. Russo, 2012
Through a comparative analysis of works by Stendhal and Dickens, this article shows how realist n... more Through a comparative analysis of works by Stendhal and Dickens, this article shows how realist novels transform the ancient trope of recognition (anagnorisis) by linking it to the experience and memory of place. The emphasis on place-specific moments of self-understanding leads to a distinct plot pattern that is recognizable in both novels: characters move in stages from a familiar (but loathed) domestic space, to the space of desire and aristocratic ambitions, and finally to isolation, self-reflection and punishment.
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Papers by Rosa Mucignat
MLN, 2018
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Comparative Critical Studies, 2014
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Deceit, Desire and the Novel Fifty Years Later: Mimetic Theory and Literary Studies
This essay tests Girard's theory of mimetic desire through a space-based interpretation of i... more This essay tests Girard's theory of mimetic desire through a space-based interpretation of interpersonal relations in a classic realist novel (Flaubert) and a world novel (Pamuk). While most theories of world literature are dependent on economical models of circulations (Moretti, Damrosch), this paper argues that the space of the provincial novel is produced by emotions and affect (admiration, jealousy, desire, antagonism).
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‘Beautiful, but scarred and paralysed, battered by forces beyond its control, but seemingly incap... more ‘Beautiful, but scarred and paralysed, battered by forces beyond its control, but seemingly incapable of resurrecting itself’: this is how a British observer describes the political situation of Italy – but not in the nineteenth century. This evocative portrayal is part of a commentary on the 2013 election published on the Guardian newspaper shortly before the vote. The image of Italy that still dominates the public discourse today is modeled on a set of ideas that emerged in the fifty years leading to the unification of 1861. In this period, the uncertain fate of the Italian peninsula became the object of intense emotional and intellectual investment for radical thinkers across Europe. This essay considers the extent to which the unpredictable course of Italian politics, constantly oscillating between a seemingly irreversible process of decay and utopian promises of regeneration, are reflected in writing by Byron and Foscolo. In particular, it analyses how both poets sought to intervene in the discussion about Italy’s future by talking about its past. Prophecy is a recurring feature in both poet’s works, most notably in Byron’s The Prophecy of Dante (1819), and in Foscolo’s Dei sepolcri (1807). I analyse how prophetic speech is used in these poems to mobilize Italy’s past in the service of Risorgimento and revolution. I also consider to what extent the ancient repertoire of religious and poetic vaticination becomes the vehicle for a new kind of historical thinking, following post-Enlightenment developments in the philosophy of history.
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Pmla-publications of The Modern Language Association of America, 2018
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ArXiv, 2021
This paper uses the collaborative project Radical Translations [1] as case study to examine some ... more This paper uses the collaborative project Radical Translations [1] as case study to examine some of the theoretical perspectives informing the adoption and critique of data visualization in the digital humanities with applied examples in context. It showcases how data visualization is used within a King’s Digital Lab project lifecycle to facilitate collaborative data exploration within the project interdisciplinary team – to support data curation and cleaning and/or to guide the design process – as well as data analysis by users external to the team. Theoretical issues around bridging the gap between approaches adopted for small and/or large-scale datasets are addressed from functional perspectives with reference to evolving data modelling and software development lifecycle approaches and workflows. While anchored to the specific context of the project under examination, some of the identified trade-offs have epistemological value beyond the specific case study iterations and its de...
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Articles by Rosa Mucignat
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Papers by Rosa Mucignat
It is to historiographers such as Muratori, Sismondi, and Burckhardt that we owe the long-standing myth of the Italian city states as embodiment of good government and republican values. This idealized vision informs much of the representations of Italy in historical fiction and drama of the Romantic period, where it clashes with a more pessimistic view of the Italian character (and of history in general), as will be shown with reference to Mary Shelley’s Valperga and Byron’s Marino Faliero.
The roots of this ideas lie in the late medieval philosophical and legal debate (e.g. Aquinas’s De regno, Bartolo da Sassoferrato, De tyranno) and literary tradition. Petrarch explicitly addressed notions of power and governance both in his vernacular and Latin prose. And while Boccaccio’s work has long been considered a-political, this paper will consider some ‘exemplary’ novellas of the Decameron, where the limits and boundaries of individual freedom play a key role in the narrative structure.