Mortiferous Poetry: mourning and the lyric in Leopardi’s Dialogo di Federico Ruysch e le sue Mummie

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Lecture Blurb: 

This lecture will focus on one of Giacomo Leopardi’s most famous Operette morali, the Dialogue Between Frederick Ruysch and his Mummies (1824), and in particular on the ‘Chorus of the Dead’ that introduces it. I will draw on some of my recent research on this text, which focuses on the nature of the relationship between mourning and the lyric. This line of research, which began with a study of self-elegy in Leopardi’s Canti several years ago, is also the result of a series of seminars on the Operette morali  organized by Leopardi Studies at Oxford, and  of two study-days held in Oxford in 2017 and 2018,  devoted to the relationship between mourning and the modern lyric, which brought together the work of scholars from Oxford, London, Warwick, and Leiden. The volume  A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry (Oxford: Legenda, 2022) edited with Adele Bardazzi and Francesco Giusti, is the happy outcome of that collaboration.

English translations will be provided!

About Ela Tandello:

Ela Tandello is a graduate of the Universities of Padua and Oxford. She is Associate Professor of Italian in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford,  and Tutor in Italian at Christ Church, St.John’s College and Worcester College. She was previously Senior Lecturer in Italian at University College London, and Bye-Fellow of Queens’ College Cambridge. She has published on poetry and drama in Italian Literature, in particular on Amelia Rosselli, Luigi Pirandello, and Giacomo Leopardi. She directs Leopardi Studies at Oxford.

Her publications include Amelia Rosselli. La fanciulla e l’infinito (Rome : Donzelli, 2007), Amelia Rosselli, L’opera poetica (edited with S. Giovannuzzi, Milan:Mondadori 2012).