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Giovanna Spampinato Summerfield

Author and Academic Scholar


New Books
 

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Works

Complete List of Books

Here is my complete list of books, from 2024 to 2002, with direct links to the publishers' sites. The list includes a variety of genres and themes.

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Reconsidering the Mediterranean, appreciating and demarginalizing the peoples and cultures of this vast region, while considering the affinities and differences, is a valuable part of the process of unframing and reframing the concept of the Mediterranean. The authors of this volume follow Franco Cassano’s refusal of a sort of prêt-à-porter reality of cohabitation of cultures, introducing instead un’alternativa mediterranea, a world of multiple cultures that entails an ongoing learning and experiencing.

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 Covering myriad intersecting and reoccurring themes within engaged public scholarship such as global citizenship, leadership, new media and its implications for community building, diversity, volunteerism, fundraising, literacy, aging populations, health and disability, granting institutions, faith-based initiatives, and nonprofit organizations, this collection serves as a model for faculty and administrators who intend to undertake community-engaged learning that brings scholarship into action.

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With its physical beauty and kaleidoscopic cultural background, Sicily has long been a source of inspiration. Twelve essays by international scholars—and additional writings from film directors Roberta Torre, Giovanna Taviani, and Costanza Quatriglio—seek to offset the near-absence of scholarship focusing on the relationship between the Mediterranean island and cinema. Touching on class relations, immigration, gender and poverty, the essays examine how Sicily is depicted in fiction, satire and documentaries.

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Through a series of original analyses of poetic works belonging to the Italian canon or purposely posing themselves at the margins of it, this book seeks to highlight poetry as an art form which has the capacity to show the incongruities of society, not just semantically, but especially through the use it makes of signifiers, which allow meaning to come through notwithstanding linear communication. Specifically, this volume identifies and analyzes a line of diverse early modern to contemporary Italian poetic works in which the goal is not only to imitate or represent the world, but to enact a change upon it.

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The island of Sicily has for centuries been a meeting point where civilizations transformed one another and gave life to the cultural developments at the foundation of European modernity. The essays collected here explore Sicily as a place where these cultural interactions have produced conflict but also new material and intellectual exchange.

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Questo volume vuole essere testimonianza di talenti femminili creativi e soprattutto una modesta e sincera espressione di gratitudine verso tutte le donne siciliane che, giorno per giorno, si fanno valere in ogni campo. Una collezione di saggi sulla letteratura, sulla storia e sulla arte che coprono dal 1800 al 2000.

...Continued List of Books

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Departing from the father of the prototype of the genre, Goethe, the authors trace imperative pathways to its French, British, and Italian counterparts, examining spiritual and female Bildungsromane. A wide-ranging analysis provides fresh insights into the genre through comparative analyses of Bildungsromane both diatopically and diachronically, while critical analysis of novels such as Voltaire's Candide, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Dickens's David Copperfield, Collodi's Pinocchio, Aleramo's Una donna present new readings of the characters, plots and purposes of the most famous European novels.

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By analyzing the Kantian response to the query What is Enlightenment?, esotericism, and, more specifically, Freemasonry as a spiritual search, this study offers a re-interpretation of the eighteenth century, one in which Enlightenment, as the pre-dominance of rationalism, and Illuminisme are viewed as complementary rather than antithetical. By focusing on the history and nature of continental Freemasonry and the Masonic affiliation of two French authors as expressed in their work--Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin and Dominique Vivant Denon--this study addresses contemporary issues.

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This volume provides a riveting account of the role of revenge as muse to many characters of modern literature from various national origins and of modern societies with their own embedded cultural reactions as well as a diversity of approaches to wishes of violent counterattacks. Through a plurality of literary subjects and perspectives, this publication provides an overview much needed in our libraries and bookstores.

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This is a sampling of Domenico (aka Micio) Tempio’s legendary wit and iconoclastic attitude, with an introduction and with translation from Sicilian into English.  The grandnephew of Tempio includes his preface and homage to the Sicilian ancestor.

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From the same publisher and in the same year, Remembering Sicily, a collection of poems and short stories, a heartfelt recollection of places, people, and events experienced while in Sicily over a lifetime, through the eyes of a native and of an adopted child.

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In an era of globalization and European standardization, dialect, patois, and linguistic pastiche are marks of identity, of individual and regional nature. Paraphrasing the words of Luigi Pirandello, one tends to use the standard national language to express the concept, while one opts to use one’s regional dialect to express the feeling. The literary tradition has always accepted language mixing. Linguists and literary critics have studied this phenomenon from different perspectives. No in-depth treatment, however, has been offered so far as to the causes, conditions, consequences, and limits of language mixing from both the linguistic and literary points of view. The aim of this book is to start to fill this lack of analysis.

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Point de lendemain is an 18th century masterpiece by Dominique Vivant Denon, first director of the Louvre.
Written in 1777 and re-edited in 1812,
Point de lendemain is a record of the initiation of a young man and a member of a secret society. The preface and notes, besides the translation from French into English, offer a new way of reading the text, marginalizing the triviality of sex and the love triangle, which has been thus far seen as a physical need rather than as an expression of supremacy and challenge of God.

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Bio

Giovanna Spampinato Summerfield was born in Catania, Sicily. A lover of foreign languages, literatures and cultures, she obtained a PhD in Romance Languages ​​and Literatures with a Minor

in European and Mediterranean History from the University of Florida (USA). She has studied and lived in Italy, France, England and various areas of the United States where she holds the role of full professor, with an extensive list of academic publications especially on topics of gender, Mediterranean literature and culture and religion.

She is editor of the renowned journal Italica

and editor of reviews for Modern Italy, Cambridge University Press, as well as founder of the very recent journal I.S. Med, Interdisciplinary Studies on the Mediterranean, Mimesis International. She has published and posted poems and photographs on blogs and specialized magazines (NOTE: Articles, book chapters and book reviews are not included in the site).

Bio

In the Press

An essential book that re-orients thinking about a vexed literary genre, bringing out the Masonic background of the Bildungsroman and convincingly presenting the important contribution of women on its variable spectrum.--Sanford Lakoff

Review on New Perspectives on the European Bildungsroman

L’autrice, professoressa negli Stati Uniti e scrittrice di diverse pubblicazioni, ha scelto di arrivare dritto al punto utilizzando un linguaggio semplice ma concreto. Non lascia niente al caso. Trasporta minuziosamente il lettore nel viaggio infido della violenza, ricostruendo gli effetti dei lividi permanenti delle donne maltrattate da principi voraci e senz’anima.

Prezioso, questo saggio curato da Giovanna Summerfield. Sua l’introduzione che, oltre a descrivere il significato dell’opera, individua le radici a cui si è ispirata con dettagliata descrizione tematica e bibliografica...

L’opera rovescia retoriche sulle donne meridionali, sulla loro luttuosità e passività, contribuendo a svelarne la potenza, la fierezza, la dignità e la loro lunghissima relazione sapienziale con il passato.

In The Press

Contact

For media inquiries, please contact directly the related book publisher.

To connect, forward email queries to summegi@gmail.com

Check the site periodically for my work in progress, publications, random thoughts on writing and updates in the field of scholarly research and creative writing.

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