Weaving the Gadda Web

Editor’s Preface

This is an issue with a difference. Our first supplement is published as a rather formidable-looking adjunct to the journal: seventy entries by thirty-three authors, mapping out the Gadda landscape through pocket-sized essays. It is a first in Gadda Studies and it provides one of the most comprehensive guides to his life and work available anywhere. It is dedicated to a great gaddista who left us last year, Robert Dombroski, one of the founding members of our Editorial Board.

To mark the trentennale since Gadda’s death, instead, EJGS is organising an international conference at the National Library of Scotland with over twenty invited speakers.

We also publish the second of a series of monographs exploring specific aspects of Gadda Studies — in this case, Leopardi’s presence in the Gadda opus.

Leopardi resurfaces in the first article of the main journal, where Cavallini looks at Gadda in his guise as literary critic extraordinaire, whereby he famously probed, with idiosyncratic ambivalence, Foscolo and Manzoni also. Biondi and Dombroski further explore more Protean themes along the Hamlet-Gonzalo parody-mimesis axis, while Pedriali concentrates on the latter character’s intricate mirroring in the dark affairs of the night sky. Usually it is Gadda as the perpetrator of linguistic pastiche that is the focus of critical attention. Gutkowski, by contrast, turns the tables on him, and, by carrying out a stylistic comparison of Pasticciaccio with Germi’s cinematic treatment of it, she looks at Gadda as the victim of semeiotic exuberance.

As far as the wider site is concerned, the publication of our third issue coincides with the inauguration of the BabelGadda section, with four translations of Gadda’s works and six critical studies in the French section, and with four essays in the German section. This testimony to Gadda’s fortune in languages other than Italian will significantly grow over the next few years. The archive has also been added to, with eleven new essays — full details are given in the Gadda News.

Federica G. Pedriali
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, February 2003

Published by The Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies (EJGS)

ISSN 1476-9859
ISBN 1-904371-03-5

© 2002-2026 by Federica G. Pedriali & EJGS. First published in EJGS. Issue no. 2, EJGS 2/2002.

Artwork © 2002-2026 by G. & F. Pedriali. Framed images: after Diego Velázquez, The Spinners, c. 1657, Museo del Prado, Madrid, and Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Librarian, c. 1566, Skoklosters, Bålsta, Sweden, with a photograph of Gadda superimposed.

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Dynamically-generated word count for this file is 408 words, the equivalent of 2 pages in print.