Otello: passioni

This book,addressed to undergraduate students and common readers, is the opening volume of a new series - I Prismi - designed to revive reading habits, skills and passions through a revisitation of the classics in Anglophone Literature. Shakespeare's "Othello" , the eccentric and provocative classic addressed in the volume, is taken as a play that stages the incipient racism and mysoginy of early modern sceptical imaginary: "Othello" shows the ways social anxieties morph into monsters of the mind and fears degenerate into discriminating violence. The book guides readers to perceive and apprehend such metamorphosis through insights into the plastic and visual quality of Shakespeare's language. In each of the three chapters - 'Maps', 'Curses', 'Secrets' - the highlight falls on topical passages where traces of the past twist into prefigurations of the future: "Othello" is seen to bear the inscriptions of gothic and horror monsters, femmes fatales, noir detectives and New Women. Shakespeare's language is thus shown as a thick medium, capable of shedding new, dramatic light on past and future history as well as on a cluster of cultural and literary images, myths and forms.