Since we have been a dialogue: Blanchot's 'Entretiens'

At the turn of the 1960s, Maurice Blanchot began publishing texts that he named entretiens, this change in his writing responding to what deconstruction sees as the closure of logocentric or continuous discourse. Paradoxically, this closure does not prevent such discourse, in which philosophical enquiry and technological change are intertwined, from dominating the modern world. By changing his writing, and by reiterating the dialogical form so central to metaphysical tradition since Plato, Blanchot gives voice to the tensions between continuity and its ‘outside’, between philosophy and literature. This is one sense in which his entretiens do not engage in a representation of difference, but instead open themselves to the inflections of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls le partage des voix.

Virgil's fourth Eclogue and the visual arts

Virgil's poetry has frequently appeared in illustrated editions, and has regularly provided subjects for other works of art, including some of the most celebrated masterpieces of the western tradition. In view of its constant appropriation in literary contexts over the course of the centuries, we might expect the famous fourth Eclogue (the so-called ‘messianic’ eclogue) to have exerted more of an impact on visual culture than it appears to have done. This paper considers some of the possible reasons for the apparent scarcity of engagement with Virgil's poem beyond the literary sphere, and examines the uses to which the poet's text is put when it does make an appearance in visual media — perhaps more often than has sometimes been supposed.

'Salve, magna parens': Virgil’s 'laudes Italiae' in Renaissance Italy and beyond

This article traces three major strands in the reception of the address to Italy at the end of Virgil’s laudes Italiae in Book II of the Georgics. The first is the adoption of phrasing from these lines as the basis for expressions of devotion to the writer’s country (and for panegyric of contemporary rulers), or in inverted form to lament the present state of the author’s homeland; the second is the appropriation of Virgil’s hymnic apostrophe to his patria in poems on religious themes, where language from this passage is harnessed to invoke the supreme deity or the Virgin Mary, another magna parens; and the third is the use of Virgilian terminology to celebrate Virgil himself as the mighty parent of poetry and poets, whose words (including those of the lines under discussion) have inspired the literary endeavours of his successors across Europe and beyond throughout subsequent centuries.

Mediating culture in the Italian literary field, 1940s-1950s: an introduction

This introduction lays out the scholarly and methodological context where to situate the contributions to this special issue. By combining a rigorous scrutiny of hitherto untapped archival sources with a re-examined application of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture within the field of periodical studies and publishing history in Italy (1940s-1950s), the studies illuminate the complex ways in which journals, periodical editors, and the connected publishing houses negotiate cultural practice in a literary field increasingly dominated by the polarization of political discourse.