Modern Spiritualism in Italian Literature and Culture (1765-1969)

Gennaro Ambrosino, Fabio Camilletti, Bart Van den Bossche

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040674888
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Religious Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In reconstructing the history of Modern Spiritualism, scholars have largely focused on its Anglo-American, French, and German developments, often overlooking the Italian context. Modern Spiritualism in Italian Literature and Culture (1765–1969) challenges this perspective by examining the Italian case as a space of intersection between transnational currents of thought and deeply rooted cultural traditions. From the Enlightenment to the occult revival of the 1960s, Modern Spiritualism in Italy engaged with scientific discourse, philosophical speculation, literary imagination, and Catholic doctrine, producing a hybrid intellectual landscape that remains largely understudied. This volume traces the circulation and transformation of spiritualist ideas across different media and disciplines, analysing their impact on literature, psychology, and science. By situating Italy within the broader European and transatlantic networks of occult knowledge, Modern Spiritualism in Italian Literature and Culture provides a new vantage point from which to rethink the historical evolution of modernity, belief, and the supernatural.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Modern Spiritualism in Italian Literature and Culture (1765–1969)
• 1 The Discourse on Spectrality in Atanasio Cavalli’s Delle apparizioni, ed operazioni de’ spiriti (1765)
• 2 ‘Gli occhi sono il telegrafo dell’anima’: Tracing the Prehistory of Modern Spiritualism in Italian Literature and Culture (1792–1853)
• 3 Esotericism, Occultism, Psychic Research, and the Origins of Modernity: Italian Cultural and Literary Landscape (1850–1930)
• 4 Investigating the Supernatural in Modern Italian Literature
• 5 Eusapia Palladino, the Despair of Science: The Uncertain Boundaries of Mediumship in Liberal-Era Italy (1861–1921)
• 6 Telling Examples? Spirits, Stories, and Plots in Luigi Pirandello
• 7 The Psychic Psyche in Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno
• 8 Spiritualism, Modernist Idealism, and the Séance: The Case of Italo Svevo
• 9 The Un-Death of the Author: Dante’s Mediumistic Afterlives
• 10 Moravia between Play and Aura in the Short Story Seduta spiritica (1960)
• 11 Night’s Spiritual Heralds: Mediumistic Phenomena and Ghostly Presences in the Milanese Newspaper La Notte (1952–1969)
• Index