Faculty

Massimo Riva : Print Publications

Saturno e le Grazie. Malinconici e Ipocondriaci nella Letteratura Italiana del Settecento (Palermo: Sellerio, 1992).

My first book is based on my dissertation (Rutgers U., 1986), a study of melancholy in Italian Neo-classicism. From 1987 on, during a series of study-trips to Italian libraries, I researched the history of early-modern medicine in the attempt to establish a connection between the late 18th century and early 19th century neoclassical texts I had previously studied and the medical literature, contemporary to those texts. I concentrated in particular on the medical descriptions of "nervous diseases." The result was a re-writing and re-creation of much of my dissertation into a study of hypochondria and melancholy in 18th century Italian literature (Saturno e le Grazie, completed in 1990 and published in Italy in 1992). In this book, I link essential transformations of 18th century sensibility and aesthetics to a paradigm shift in the history of medical science. Its fundamental hypothesis can be summed up as follows: the traditional melancholy and pathological hypochondria of philosophers, writers, poets and litterati are two sides of a symptomatic-symbolic complex and a central feature in the battle between Enlightenment and Tradition. I compare medical and literary texts, showing how melancholy, hypochondria, vapours, etc. are both symptoms and symbolic expressions of modernization and its discontents: imaginary maladies and/or maladies of the imagination, professional ailments of "men of letters," obscure illnesses of decaying social groups, maladies of civilization, politically and sexually defined syndromes, their literary treatments crossing the boundaries of gender, genre and national characters or identities. (In the upper left corner of this document you see a detail of Salvator Rosa's Democrito in meditazione as it appears on the cover of my book).

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