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George Sand was the most famous, and the most scandalous, woman in nineteenth-century France. As a writer, she was enormously prolific: she wrote more than ninety novels, thirty-five plays, and thousands of pages of autobiography. She inspired writers as diverse as Flaubert and Proust but is often remembered for her love affairs with such figures as Musset and Chopin. Her affair with Chopin is the most notorious: their nine-year relationship ended in 1847 when Sand began to suspect that the composer had fallen in love with her daughter, Solange. Drawing on archival sources, much of it neglected by Sand's previous biographers, this book examines the intertwined issues of maternity and identity that haunt Sand's writing and defined her life. Why was Sand's relationship with her daughter so fraught? Why was a woman so famous for her personal and literary audacity ultimately so conflicted about women's liberation? In an effort to solve the riddle of Sand's identity, the book examines a latticework of lives that include Solange, Sand's mother and grandmother, and Sand's own protagonists, whose stories amplify her own.

This book serves as a literary map to guide readers through the varied geography of contemporary Italian fiction. The book includes English-language translations of short stories and excerpts from novels that were originally published in Italian between 1975 and 2001. As an expression of a communal contemporary condition, these narratives suggest a new sensibility and a new way of seeing, exploring, and inhabiting the world, in writing. The book provides an introduction to Italian literary trends of the past twenty years. Each selection is preceded by a short introduction and biography of the writer.

This book argues that the sudden decline of old rural vernaculars—such as French patois, Italian dialects, and the Irish language—caused these languages to become the objects of powerful longings and projections that were formative of modernist writing. Seán í Ríordáin in Ireland and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy reshaped minor languages to use as private idioms of poetry; the revivalist conception of Irish as a lost, perfect language deeply affected the work of James Joyce; the disappearing dialects of northern France seemed to Marcel Proust to offer an escape from time itself. Drawing on a broad range of linguistic and cultural examples to present a major reevaluation of the origins and meaning of European literary modernism, the book shows how the vanishing languages of the European countryside influenced metropolitan literary culture in fundamental ways.

This book explores Italian Romanticism and the modern myth of Italy. Ranging across European and international borders, the book examines the metaphors, facts, and fictions about Italy that were born in the Romantic age and continue to haunt the global literary imagination. The themes of the book include the emergence of Italy as the “world's university” (Goethe) and “mother of arts” (Byron), the influence of Dante's Commedia on Romantic autobiography, and the representation of the Italian body politic as a woman at home and abroad. The book also provides a critical reevaluation of the three crowns of Italian Romantic letters, Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, and Alessandro Manzoni—profoundly influential writers largely undiscovered in Anglo-American criticism. The book offers fresh insights into the influence of Italian literary, cultural, and intellectual traditions on the foreign imagination from the Romantic age to the present.

This book re-examines the role of Catholicism in the modern Spanish novel. While other studies of fiction and faith have focused largely on religious themes, this book views the religious impulse as a crisis of modernity—a fundamental catalyst in the creative and moral development of Spanish narrative.