Professor Reviews Paolo Mantegazza's Writings

Physician, anthropologist, travel writer, novelist and politician, Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910) is considered one of the most eclectic figures in late-nineteenth century Italian culture. A prolific writer, Mantegazza can be seen as a forerunner of what has come to be known as cultural studies on account of his interdisciplinary approach, his passionate blend of scientific and literary elements in his writings, and his ability to transcend the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.

Though extremely popular during his lifetime both in Italy and abroad, Mantegazza’s works have not been made available in a significant English language compilation until now. In The Physiology of Love and Other Writings (Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library) (University of Toronto Press, 2007), Nicoletta Pireddu presents Paolo Mantegazza’s works along with her extensive monographic essay and notes on the reputed renaissance man.

“But granted that Mantegazza was not a half-tone figure, what still makes him stimulating a century after his own death, despite the slatings and the oblivion that followed his triumph? His very eclecticism, one could venture to claim,” writes Pireddu, director of the Comparative Literature Program and an associate professor in the Department of Italian at Georgetown University. “Mantegazza’s extraordinary blend of pioneering intuitions and absurdly dated viewpoints effectively maps the circulation of ideas and the cross fertilization of disciplines in a complex and contradictory period of Italian and European cultural life, in which the positivist cult of the true merges with the irrational and emotional impulses of the fin de siècle [end of the century].”

With a thorough and reflective introduction by Pireddu, the volume is a representative overview of Mantegazza’s key works, many of them translated into English for the first time. In addition to the unabridged Physiology of Love (1873), a veritable best-seller at the time of its initial publication, Pireddu’s compilation features selections from Mantegazza’s writings on medicine, his travelogues, his epistolary novel One Day in Madeira (1868), and his treatise on materialistic aesthetics, as well as excerpts of his works of science fiction, memoir, and social and cultural criticism.

“With his fertile imagination, extraordinary insights, intriguing contradictions, and grotesque limitations (among them a frequent lack of what we know call political correctness), the hyperactive and versatile Paolo Mantegazza is the sum of all the diverse roles and characters explored here, but also much more…” writes Pireddu. “…No matter what reactions the material generates, we believe that a picture of nineteenth-century Italy without a touch of Mantegazza’s personality and writings is truly incomplete,” Pireddu tells readers.

Nicoletta Pireddu is director of the Comparative Literature Program and an associate professor in the Department of Italian at Georgetown University. A comparatist by training, she is an expert in European literary and cultural relations, with particular attention to the Italian, English and French contexts from the 19th century to the present. Her other areas of scholarly research are literary and critical theories, translation theories and anthropological approaches to literature. Pireddu has published over 40 articles dealing with comparative issues, which have appeared in American and European volumes and scholarly journals such as Romanic Review, Comparative Literature, Comparatistica, The Translator, The Comparatist and Stanford French and Italian Studies. She is also the author of the volume Antropologi alla corte della bellezza, Decadenza ed economia simbolica nell'Europa fin de siècle [Anthropologists at the court of beauty, Decadence and symbolic economy in fin de siècle Europe], which won the 2003 American Association for Italian Studies Book Award.

A recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) 2006 Fellowships for University Teachers program, Pireddu received a $40,000 grant from the NEH Division of Research Programs that allowed her to take full-time research leave for the 2007-2008 academic year. During this time she has been working toward completion of her forthcoming manuscript, tentatively titled The Fiction of Europe, Europe in Fiction, which examines the neglected role of literature in the cultural construction of a European consciousness.

Source: Office of Communications

April 28, 2008