Dr Elisa Segnini
- Senior Lecturer (Italian)
telephone:
01413305338
email:
Elisa.Segnini@glasgow.ac.uk
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2048-3623Research interests
- Modern and contemporary Italian Literature as World Literature
- Literary multilingualism
- Translation
- Fin-de-siècle literature and thought
- Decadence as a global, transnational movement
- European modernism, in particular the relationship between literature, theatre and visual arts
My research engages with current debate in Comparative Literature, with a dual focus on fin-de-siècle culture and contemporary fiction. My first monograph, Fragments, Genius and Madness: Masks and Mask-Making in the Modernist Imagination (Legenda 2021) explores tales that revolve around masks and mask-making in relation to nineteenth-century thought, offering innovative readings of fictional and dramatic works by Max Beerbohm, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Jean Lorrain, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Andrey Bely, next to artifacts such as the plaster cast of the Inconnue de la Seine, the waxes of criminals held in Cesare Lombroso’s museum, Rodin’s ‘horror masks’ modelled after a Japanese dancer. By uncovering the role of masks as key tropes in fin-de-siècle culture, it also demonstrates to what extent the medical, anthropological and aesthetic spheres overlapped, offering insights that contribute to debates about gender and ethnicity in decadence and modernist studies. http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/sicl-56
Together with Michael Subialka (UC Davis), I am in the process of editing a book titled D’Annunzio and World Literature: Multilingualism, Translation, Reception (Edinburgh University Press). A leading poet, novelist, playwright, translator, journalist, Gabriele D’Annunzio was a pivotal figure in late nineteenth-century culture and enjoyed large crowds of followers. Larger than life, he can be considered the equivalent of a contemporary influencer. This book brings together renowned scholars from different continents to explore on the one hand D’Annunzio’s engagement with foreign literature and his experiments with self-translation and translingual writing, and on the other the dialogues with his translators and the global reception of his work, from Europe to Argentina to Egypt to Japan. https://www.hastac.org/groups/dannunzio-world-literature
In the past few years, I’ve also published a series of articles on translation and multilingualism on 20th century and contemporary fiction. Research undertaken for these articles forms the core of my next monograph, titled Local Flavour, Global Audiences: Worlding Multilingual Fiction. Building on Rebecca Walkowitz’s paradigm of the ‘born translated novel’ and on studies of literary multilingualism, this book is the first to examine Italian multilingual fiction in terms of consumption and reception. The book is divided into six chapters developed around case studies that examine the relationship between the functions of multilingualism in original texts, the extent, if any, of the authors’ ambitions to speak to wider audiences, and the portability of these novels across time and history. Authors considered include Gabriele D’Annunzio, Alba De Céspedes, Luigi Meneghello, Laura Pariani, Elena Ferrante.
I am one of the editors of the general editors of Comparative Critical Studies, a journal dedicated to the theory and practice of the study of comparative literature: https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/ccs
Grants
2016 Connection Grant, Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
2014 Insight Development Grant, Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
2012 Aid to Research Workshops and Conferences, Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
2009 George C. Metcalf Research Grant, Victoria College, University of Toronto
Teaching
- Italian literature (19th to 21st century)
- Italian cinema and theatre
- Comparative literature
