Thinking Italian Animals

Situated on the cutting edge of scholarship in a variety of fields, this bracing volume draws together essays on Italian writers and filmmakers whose work engages with nonhuman animal subjectivity. Analyzing works from unification to the present, they address three major strands of current philosophical thought: the perceived borders between man and nonhuman animals, historical and fictional crises facing humanity, and human entanglement with the nonhuman and material world.

These essays are driven by philosophical, theoretical, and ethical questions that interrogate Italian cultural production in provocative new ways, and their analysis has implications not simply for Italianists, but for a range of scholars doing work within cross-disciplinary fields such as animal studies, ecocriticism, and posthuman philosophy.

Review: Animals and the Posthuman in Italian Literature and Film is an elegant and musing collection on what it means to be alive and thinking today. The volume contains a wonderful preface by Italian philosopher, Roberto Marchesini , who sets out the stakes of the work beautifully. Indeed, it has been a long time since I've come across such a powerful combination of erudition, cutting-edge readings of continential philosophy, and, though this may seem surprising given the title, humanity. - Timothy Campbell, Professor of Italian Studies and Chair of Romance Studies, Cornell University, USA