Arrigo Boito's Short Stories

منو

" Arrigo Boito's Short Stories "
Perella, Nicolas J.

Document Type	:	AL
Record Number	:	907985
Doc. No	:	LA7541s7r6
Title & Author	:	Arrigo Boito's Short Stories [Article]\ Perella, Nicolas J.
Date	:	2010
Title of Periodical	:	UC Berkeley
Abstract	:	Arrigo Boito (1842-1918) is the author of the four tales presented here for the first time in English translation: <em>The Black Ensign, Clenched Fist, Iberia, and Trapeze</em>. Outside of Italy, he is known almost exclusively as the composer of <em>Mefistotele</em>, an opera for which he himself wrote the libretto. He is in fact equally esteemed as a consummate librettist, above all for the remarkable texts he created for Giuseppe Verdi’s last two masterpieces, <em>Otello</em>, and <em>Falstaff</em>. But in his homeland, he ranks rather high among the literati as a significant poet in the period when Italian political unification (1860-1870) was at long last realized, and he and a number of other young literary rebels generally referred to as the <em>"Scapigliati"</em> (the disheveled or disorderly ones) wrote works meant to shock the complacent insular culture of the Italian bourgeoisie into a broader European context. The chief targets of their polemic were religion – more specifically Roman Catholicism – and the prevailing maudlin romanticism of the time, so unlike the writings of Manzoni, Foscolo, and Leopardi in the earlier decades of the century.