Abstract: The editors of the volume Speaking Truth to Power from Medieval to Modern Italy make an effort to wrestle the category of power away from the Foucauldian camp and use it as a tool to investigate state coercion and literary expressions of resistance against it. As Jo Ann Cavallo and Carlo Lottieri explain in the introductory chapter (which, however, takes aim more at Marxism than post-modernism), scholars have usually reduced the concept of power to economic and cultural processes. Instead, the editors of this volume wish to focus their attention on political power, its violent nature, and in particular, its most disturbing embodiment: the state.
Keywords: Literary criticism, critical theory, Italian literature, power, liberalism
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