Malinconie del Moderno. Disagio della Nazionalità e Critica dell'Incivilimento nella Letteratura Italiana dell'Ottocento (Ravenna: Longo, 2001, 178 p.).

The fruit of my genealogical perspective on maladies and "malaise" within the culture of modernism, my second book is titled Melancholies of Modernity. Discontent of Nationality and Critique of Civilization in 19th Century Literature. It is divided into three sections, with essays on the major protagonists of Italian literary proto-modernism: from Vittorio Alfieri and the Romantic triad of Foscolo, Leopardi and Manzoni to the pivotal fin de siècle figure of Gabriele D'Annunzio. In this book, I engage in a genealogical reading of the 19th Century Italian literary canon, treating pivotal and influential texts such as Alfieri's Vita, Foscolo's epistolary novel Le Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, Leopardi's Canti and Zibaldone, Manzoni's Promessi Sposi and D'Annunzio's "decadent" opus, as symptomatic diagnoses and paradoxical "therapies" of broader socio-political "maladies," in the age of nationalism and nihilism. (In the upper left corner of this document you see a detail of Michael Sweerts' 17th-century Portrait of a Young Man or Self-portrait , now at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, as it appears on the cover of my book).

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