Di ironia ci si occupa sin dall’antichità: ancora oggi costituisce un fenomeno di ampie dimensioni, oggetto di un dibattito tutt’altro che sopito, riguardante la sua definizione e la sua identità. L’ironia è comunicazione, ...

The beginning of the twenty first century can be described as a liminal period of discarding old interests and preoccupations in preparation for the arrival of something new. This feeling of standing on a threshold is also ...

In this article I will analyze three satirical stories written by Edgar A. Poe, Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain. The common denominator of them is the presence of dogs and their eccentric subject matter and controversial ...

It has been stated, on the basis of certain motifs in The Chronicles of Narnia, that “like many Englishmen of his era, Lewis was unconsciously but regrettably unsympathetic to things and people Middle Eastern” (Ford 363). ...

The aim of this paper is to apply Arnold van Gennep’s and Victor Turner’s conceptual scheme of the rite of passage to medieval and early modern visions of the hereafter. Most of the visionary accounts (e.g., Drythelm’s ...

The pastoral has often been defined in terms of an idyllic retreat where man can regain his former unity with nature, from which he has been alienated as a consequence of urban life. At the same time, however, the pastoral ...

The Marriage of Mary and Joseph, Joseph’s Doubt and The Trial of Mary and Joseph are fifteenth-century pageants from the cycle known as The N-Town Plays (or Ludus Coventriae). The first centres on legal and social controversies ...

The objective of the present paper is to examine the two contrastive yet interconnected processes activated in parody: conservative and revolutionary. The conservative drive is associated with the continuation and reinforcement ...