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                      Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Italy

                     

      The Italians: A Full-Length Portrait Featuring Their Manners and Morals, Luigi Barzini

     Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic, Silvana Patriarca

     The Pursuit of Italy, David Gilmour

      The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean, A Short History of Byzantium, A History of Venice, Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy, Julius Norwich

      Rome: The Biography of a City, Florence: The Biography of a City, The Borgias and Their Enemies: 1431-1519, The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall, Garibaldi: Hero of Italian Unification, Christopher Hibbert

     The Invention of Sicily: A Mediterranean History, Jamie Mackay

     Seeking Sicily: A Cultural Journey Through Myth and Reality in the Heart of the Mediterranean, John Keahey

     SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Confronting the Classics, Mary Beard

     The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World’s Greatest Empire, Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician, Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor, Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome, Anthony Everitt

     Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar, Tom Holland

     Caesar: Life of a Colossus, Augustus: First Emperor of Rome, Antony and Cleopatra, Adrian Goldsworthy

     I, Claudius, Claudius the God, Count Belisarius, Robert Graves

     Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar

     Constantine the Great: The Man and His Times, Michael Grant 

     Julian, Gore Vidal

     The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, Peter Heather

      Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu, Laurence Bergreen

     Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence, Florence: The Golden Age 1138-1737, Gene A. Brucker

     Tiepolo Pink, The Ruin of Kasch, Roberto Calasso

     The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone

     Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture, Ross King

     The Venice Variations, Sophia Psarra

     The Passion of Artemisia, Susan Vreeland

     Galileo, Bertolt Brecht

     Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love, Dava Sobel

     A Concise History of the Italian Renaissance, Hale ed

     Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Silvia Federici

     Casanova: Actor Lover Priest Spy, Ian Kelly

     M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio, Peter Robb

     Verdi, Puccini: His Life and Works, Julian Budden

     Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, Lucy Riall

      Mussolini Warlord: Failed Dreams of Empire, 1940-1943, H. James Burgwyn

     The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, Rick Atkinson

     Bitter Victory: The Battle For Sicily, July August 1943, Carlo D’Este

     Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, Peter Caddick-Adams

     Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944, Lloyd Clark

     Naples ’44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy, Norman Lewis

     The Cinema of Federico Fellini, The Films of Federico Fellini, Bondanella

                  Literature

     Tales From Ovid, Ted Hughes

     The Aenead, Robert Fagles translator, The Georgics, The Eclogues, Virgil

     Virgil: His Life and Times, Horace: a life, Peter Levi

     Six Tragedies, Seneca, Emily Wilson translator

     The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca, Emily Wilson

     Rome and the Mysterious Orient: Three Plays by Plautus, Amy Richlin trans.

     The Golden Ass, Apuleius, Graves trans.

The Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man, Marie-Louise von Franz

     The Satyricon, Petronius, Arrowsmith trans.

     The Sixteen Satires, Juvenal, Green trans, Clausen editor

     The Alexiad, Anna Comnena

     Divine Comedy, Dante

Dante (Wiley Blackwell Guides to Literature), Nick Havely

Dark Wood to White Rose: Journey and Transformation in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Helen Luke

Dante Aligheri, Ricardo Quinones

Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Journey Without End, Ian Thompson

Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination, The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses, Peter S. Hawkins

     Lyric Poems, Petrarch

     The Decameron, Boccacio

     Leonardo’s Notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci, H. Anna Suh editor

Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Isaacson

     The Lives of the Artists, Vasari

The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art, Rowland & Charney

     The History of Italy, Maxims and Reflections, Francesco Guicciardini

     The Prince, The Discourses, Machiavelli

Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power, Ross King

     The New Science, Giambattista Vico

     An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, edited by David Forgacs

     The Book of the Courtier, Baldesar Castiglione

     The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

     Jerusalem Delivered, Torquato Tasso

     Lives of the Gods, Savinio

     Zibaldone, Giacomo Leopardi

     The Untameables, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

     The Leopard, The Professor and the Siren, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

     That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana,  Carlo Emilio Gadda

     Sirens: stories, Dino Buzzati

     Periodic Table, The Mirror Maker, Primo Levi

Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy, Sergio Luzzatto

     Gogol’s Wife and other stories, Landolfo

     Six Characters in Search of an Author,, One No One and One Hundred Thousand,  Luigi Pirandello

Pirandello’s Henry IV: a new version by Tom Stoppard

     The Confessions of Zeno, Italo Svevo

     Dialogues with Leucò, Cesare Pavese, William Arrowsmith trans

     Pier Paolo Pasolini: My Cinema, Poems, A Violent Life, Pier Paolo Pasolini

The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade, Armando Maggi

     The Baron in the Trees, Numbers in the Dark, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Mr Palomar, The Nonexistent Knight and the Cloven Viscount, Invisible Cities,  If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Cosmicomics, t zero, Italian Folktales, Why Read the Classics?, Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino: A Journey toward Postmodernism, Constance Markey

     Foucault’s Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, The Name of the Rose, Postscript to The Name of the Rose, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Prague Cemetry, On Literature, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, On Literature,  Serendipities: on Language and Lunacy, History of Beauty, On Ugliness, The Infinity of Lists, The Search for the Perfect Language, From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation,  The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, Umberto Eco

 Umberto Eco’s Alternative: The Politics of Culture and the Ambiguities of Interpretation. with an Essay by Umberto Eco, Norma Bouchard editor

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jayofdollhousepark

I am a former counselor, teacher, and debate coach who loves to read and write, and a student of literature, psychology, history, philosophy, and languages who loves to travel. Help me celebrate the lives and works of our great authors as a common human heritage. I can also be reached at jayofdollhousepark@gmail.com. Regarding my literary criticism on Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium: My initial project was to celebrate the authors whose work I love on their birthdays, by reading something of theirs and writing an appreciation. I've now come full circle and completed the calendar year. These are the authors whose works have been my companions through life, and some new discoveries. Many of their books are ones I also taught in high school English classes; works thoroughly lived with. I also include reading lists by national literature, a Modern American Literature group of lists, and Best Books of the Year lists and reviews. There will occasionally be my own poetry as well; you are warned. I hope that you may also find books which will help you through life and bring depth and joy to your days. As to my aesthetics, I envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year. Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values. We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience. A beautiful political structure may be judged by the same criterion as a beautiful poem; so also with humans and the values their actions embody. Thank you so much for your company on this journey. Regarding my daily political journal on Torch of Freedom, a voice of progressive democracy and the antifascist Resistance: I stand for liberty, equality, truth, and justice; a free society of equals. My America is a torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world. I stand for the absolute structural and systemic equality of all human beings, and for the Rights of Man everywhere on earth. I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. Herein I write as an agent of Chaos and Transformation whose goal in life is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world. For thirty-nine years now I have been engaged in antifascist action, democracy activism, and revolutionary struggle against tyranny and state terror for the liberation of humankind, wherever men hunger to be free. And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut 1982 by the great Jean Genet as he formulated it in Paris 1940, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Resist and fear not, O my brothers and sisters, for in resistance we seize our freedom and become Unconquered.

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