This article focuses on the effects of censorship on the translations of two of Roth's novels into Spanish: Portnoy's Complaint (1969) and The Professor of Desire (1977). These two novels, published in Spanish for the first time in 1977 and 1978 respectively - a period when Spain had barely left behind General Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975) - suffered various forms of censorship. The article shows how the four criteria (Abellán 1980) used by the censors of the period - sexual morality, linguistic decorum, politics and respect for religion as an institution - were applied in the case of these two Roth novels.

Robert Lowell coined the famous distinction between cooked and raw poetry, but beginning with Joel Barlow's epic treat The Hasty Pudding there is a long tradition of American poetics sustained by copious and artful use of tropes of hunger, food, and eating. Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems and Lowell's Life Studies would be emaciated beyond recognition without them. Also taking other poems into account, the essay argues that Lowell and Ginsberg did more to enrich the American alimentary poetic tradition than anyone else since T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. 

This essay reconsiders Virginia Woolf's much-debated claim that "on or about December 1910, human character changed," reassessing its import not as the provocation to her contemporaries that seems to have been intended, or as a statement of originality, but in a historical envelope that encompasses Woolf's own fictional oeuvre within a tradition of representing women in fiction. This tradition is essentially rhetorical and literary rather than essentialist; it engages with representations and associations rather than directly with psychological or philosophical questions about personality or identity. As such, "character" should be understood as involving a series of recognizable codes or tropes played through new contexts, with Shakespeare's representations of women as a constant touchstone or reference point. A pioneer of "stream of consciousness" prose and Modernist fiction, Woolf is normally read for her innovations in representing selfhood; this experimentalism, I suggest, is built on a bedrock of familiar imagery that reveals her involvement in a continuing literary tradition of character representation. Her interest in late nineteenth-century and contemporary developments in depth psychology notwithstanding, Woolf's revolutionary prose style shows evidence of her careful reading of previous literary evocations of character, particularly the characters of women. What is at issue, then, is not primarily existential questions about whether character "is" innate, self-fashioned, or merely linguistic, but rather critical or representational issues of how literary character has been evoked so as to create certain responses in readers. In the process, however, the larger existential questions are implicitly invoked, and shown to be not novel concerns of modernist psychology but continuing issues in literary understandings of the concept of "character" itself, at least as far back as the seventeenth century. In addition to a range of Woolf's own critical and creative writing, the essay considers works by Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Robert Burns, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Walter Pater, Henry James and Oscar Wilde.

This article addresses the problems of the Italian translation of Philip Roth's American Pastoral by Vincenzo Mantovani. The theoretical backdrop against which the assessment is set concerns the novel's intentional system as David Herman interprets it in his "Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance." Accordingly, the notion of "intentional equivalence" is proposed as a tool for comparing the original text and its translation. Well aware that the creation of effects starts at the lexical level, word choices at crucial textual junctures are examined, starting with the incipit and proceeding with pivotal moments in the first 90 pages of the book. These pages revolve around a very tight intentional construction depending on Zuckerman's immersion in the Swede's mystique and the consequent need for the narrator to write his story. The article demonstrates that because of inexplicable translation choices the Italian reader is inevitably led into a storyworld different from the original as far as focalizing perspective, ironic distance, and empathetic involvement are concerned. 

June 2013: Pia Masiero is assistant professor of North-American Literature at the University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari. Her research and teaching focus on twentieth-century prose, the American Renaissance, as well as narratology and contemporary American fiction. Her recent publications include, Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: the Making of a Storyworld (Cambria Press 2011) “‘Nothing is impersonally perceived’: Dreams, Realistic Chronicles and Perspectival Effects in American Pastoral” (Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2011) and Names across the Color Line: William Faulkner’s Short Fiction 1931-1942 LT2 Studio 2012).