Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity: From the Scapigliatura to the Futurist Movement, 1857-1912 [Paperback]

This book establishes the role of French writer Charles Baudelaire in the formation of paradigms of modernity in Italian poetry between 1857, the year of publication of Baudelaires highly influential collection Les Fleurs du Mal, and 1912, when the first anthology of Futurist poetry, I poeti futuristi, was published in Milan. It focuses primarily on Baudelaires influence on the poetry of the Scapigliatura, a long-underrated movement which in the 1860s introduced a thematic and formal modernity into Italian literature, paving the way for Futurism and the twentieth-century avant-garde. This monograph also investigates Baudelaires and the Scapigliaturas interrelated impacts on early Futurist poetry, demonstrating that Futurist poets turned to the works of Baudelaire and the Scapigliatura for inspiration on themes that were considered as distinctly unpoetic  and therefore modern  such as medical-anatomical examination, technological transformation, and abnormal sensuality.

Chapter:1.Introducing Modernity: French, Italian, and Comparative Perspectives.- Chapter:2. Unpoetic Poetry and the Rise of Modernity: Science and Medicine in the Scapigliatura.- Chapter:3. Allegory and Modernity in the Scapigliatura.-Chapter:4. Sensual Sacredness and Sacred Sensuality: Love, Sex, and Religion in the Scapigliatura.- Chapter:5.Writing Analogy, Writing Modernity: The Scapigliatura and Baudelaires Correspondances Synaesthesia and Intoxicating Visions.- Chapter:6. From Organic to Inorganic Matter, From Spirit to Speed: Early Futurist Poetry and the Scapigliaturas Legacy.- Chapter:7. Concluding Modernity: Writing Analogy, Writing Avant-garde.

“This book will be required reading for anyone interested in the development of European modernism at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentiethl“²