ISBN 978-3-03911-226-5
US-ISBN 978-0-8204-8912-4

This book comprises ten essays on Shakespearean drama, the majority of which focus on the problem of language and more particularly on issues pertaining to names and their meanings. Four of these essays deal specifically with Romeo and Juliet, and examine the work in different sets of terms: as a reply to the aspersions against Shakespeare contained in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, as a representative site for a kind of archaeology of meaning, as an experiment in the poetics of identity, and as a meditation on the interrelation between rival conceptions of time. Other works subjected to extended analyses in independent essays are Richard II, Julius Caesar and Macbeth, all of which are interpreted as tragedies of language in which the paradoxes inherent in names and naming are enacted in the personal dilemmas of the protagonists. The final two essays in the volume, comparative rather than exegetical in approach, explore the intricate web of allusion linking The Tempest with Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Jonson’s The Alchemist, and consider the contribution that all three plays make to the Renaissance exploration of the role played by art and knowledge in human life. Reviewed in The Year's Work in English Studies, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, etc.

The Serpent's Part:
Narrating the Self in Canadian Literature

Bern-Berlin-New York-Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003.

ISBN 3-03910-039-4
US-ISBN 0-8204-6270-5

Canada is a country in which the issue of identity has always been a prominent concern, and one that has frequently been explored in the literature of that nation. The theme of identity often merges into that of language, the forging of names and the elaboration of narratives being perceived as means through which identity is constructed in both the private and the public spheres. This study examines the relation between identity and language as this is evidenced in a number of works of Canadian literature, ranging from Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush to Timothy Findley’s Famous Last Words. Particular attention is dedicated to the telling of stories in these books, both as an existential strategy on the part of particular authors or the characters they create, and as an explicitly thematized concern. It is argued that while the works under discussion dramatize the paradoxes and the perils inherent in the endeavour to construct the self by narrative means, they also insist on the primacy of narrative in imparting a coherent pattern to experience, and on the centrality of the role it plays in humanity’s quest for meaning. Reviewed in The Year's Work in English Studies, International Fiction Review, Canadian Literature, etc. An online version of the Canadian Literature review can be viewed by clicking here.

Giorno nella notte:
Quattro saggi su “Romeo e Giulietta”

Lecce: Milella, 2002.

ISBN 88-7048-380-0

Il volume raccoglie le versioni italiane di saggi vertenti su Romeo e Giulietta precedentemente apparsi in riviste accademiche europee e nordamericane in lingua inglese. Il primo capitolo, incentrato sulla famosa scena del balcone, esamina la tensione che si verifica tra lo sforzo degli innamorati di esternare il proprio mondo interiore mediante un linguaggio carico di significati personali e privati, e il carattere pubblico, convenzionale e ideologico del mezzo linguistico a loro disposizione. Il secondo capitolo analizza il modo in cui l’ossimoro, figura retorica predominante in Romeo e Giulietta, diviene paradigma linguistico delle dinamiche operanti nel dramma a livello di intrecci e di temi. Nel terzo capitolo si prende in esame l’azione distruttiva che il tempo, nella sua dimensione oggettiva e pubblica, esercita sull’agire umano, e l’inevitabile fallimento di ogni tentativo individuale di costringerlo in una dimensione soggettiva e privata. Il capitolo conclusivo analizza l’elaborazione poetica di particolari termini omofoni—I, ay, e eye—i quali, assumendo valori divergenti e a volte contrastanti, veicolano sul piano linguistico i conflitti fra le dimensioni pubbliche e private dell’identità.

Ancestors and Gods:
Margaret Laurence and the Dialectics of Identity

Bern-Berlin-New York-Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002.

ISBN 3-906767-56-6
US-ISBN 0-8204-5627-6

This book examines the entire corpus of Margaret Laurence’s writings from the point of view of the ambiguities and paradoxes that are an inherent feature of her work. This indeterminacy of meaning reflects the profoundly ambivalent attitude with which Laurence explored the issues dramatized in her books, foremost among which is that of individual and cultural identity. It is argued that Laurence’s vision tends to articulate itself through what appear to be irreconcilable oppositions, but that these oppositions are subjected to processes of symbolic mediation as the writer pursues their implications. Laurence’s works can therefore best be approached dialectically, in terms of the radically different conceptions of life they simultaneously convey, and of the effort to arbitrate their conflicting claims through the act of writing itself. Reviewed in Canadian Literature,  Essays on Canadian Writing, Margaret Laurence Review, etc.  An online version of the Canadian Literature review can be viewed by clicking here.

Plays Upon the Word:
Shakespeare’s Drama of Language

Lecce: Milella, 1997.

ISBN 88-7048-329-0

The essays comprising this volume examine six Shakespearean plays from the point of view of their common concern with the role played by language in fashioning the reality that human beings inhabit, and with the hazards inherent in this constitutive enterprise. The plays analyzed are Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, Othello and Coriolanus. The author suggests that language is an unnamed protagonist in all of the works under discussion, and that the vicissitudes to which it is subjected both reflect, and are closely implicated in, those undergone by the human characters. A review of this book published in the electronic journal Early Modern Literary Studies can be viewed by clicking here.

Myth and Identity:
Essays on Canadian Literature

Lecce: Milella, 1995.

ISBN 88-7048-299-5

This book consists of essays analyzing various works by Mordecai Richler, Margaret Atwood, George Bowering, and Margaret Laurence. The common concern linking these analyses is that of the relation between personal identity and the various public definitions of selfhood in terms of which individuals are perceived. The problematic nature of this relation emerges into particular prominence in the works selected for discussion, because they deal with individuals uprooted in some respect from their own cultures, and constrained therefore to confront the problem of identity in contexts that fail to offer them any external support.

Beyond Innocence:
Literary Transformations of the Fall

Rome: Nuova Arnica, 1991.

This book is an extended analysis of the fall-motif in British and American literature. Among the authors whose works are examined are Milton, P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, Hawthorne, Conrad, James and Joyce.  It is argued that the Fall is invoked by all of these authors as a metaphor for the emancipation of the self through knowledge and culture, and therefore represents an indispensable phase in the evolution of every human being even if it entails a paradoxical separation of the self from the matrix in which it is ultimately grounded. It is argued that a structural analogy can be discerned between many of the works under examination, one that derives from their common intuition that the Fall that is prerequisite to the full realization of self is at the same time potentially destructive of the personal and social bonds that are also necessary for a complete humanity. For this reason, in the majority of these works the ordeal of the individual who is obliged to undergo the Fall, and who is consequently expelled in some way from the world to which he hitherto belonged, is viewed through the eyes of mediating figures who succeed in actualizing the positive implications of the Fall without separating themselves irremediably from the social world.

Conrad’s Mysteries:
Variations on an Archetypal Theme

Lecce: Milella, 1986.

ISBN 88-7048-129-8

This book examines the bulk of Conrad’s work written between 1897 and 1911 from the point of view of the initiatory archetype that constitutes a recurrent structural motif in these works. Taking as his point of departure the tripartite formulation of the rites de passage proposed by Arnold van Gennep and others, the author analyzes the manner in which analogous structures condition the plots, the symbolism and the metaphoric texture of the works under discussion. One of the conclusions to emerge from this study is that Conrad, although he was ostensibly secular in his outlook on life, tended to gravitate towards mythic and even religious interpretations of experience that in some ways contradict the attitudes he professed.

The Artifice of Eternity:
An Essay on "The Tempest"

Lecce: Adriatica Editrice Salentina, 1983.

This extended analysis of The Tempest examines a number of the themes developed in the play in terms of the contraposition between order and chaos, on the one hand, and the cosmology of Empedocles on the other. It is argued that the Empedoclean doctrine of the elements provides one possible key to the symbolic structure of the work.