literary-historians

"And this little volume dedicated to the rustic Davos of a handful of sick people should be placed in a particular light - and in part of failures - who maintain their precarious health in this Zauberberg of the frontier infested with rattlesnakes and poisonous herbs. A light that allows us to grasp that stylistic maturity that is on the verge of germinating in the freedom of invention, of definitively freeing itself from the last constraints of a personal experience and the residues of a long, exhausting internship."

"The Tuscan capital does not conquer its guests with a spectacle which, like the bewitching embrace of the Venetian lagoon, or the intensity of the Neapolitan panoramas, or the picturesque Roman ruins, can be reduced to a tourist stereotype. The reserve, the sense of proportion, the intellectual rigor of its architecture, no less than the rationality of a landscape combed by the hand of man, mainly attract cultured and refined people. In the eyes of the citizen of tumultuous London or of the sooty industrial cities, Florence with its hills and its basin bisected by the Arno reveals itself as an ideal microcosm, the idea of ​​a city immersed in a arcane harmony."

"The Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt [...] traveled across much of Palestine in a passionate search for places and people who would allow him an adequate reconstruction of crucial scenes from the Gospels [...]. Precisely because he feels he is the last witness of a world in the process of slow but inexorable change, his reconstruction of evangelical scenes and episodes, conducted through careful historical research, is extremely meticulous in detail and overloaded with a heavy and erudite."

"Jekyll is not just an example of hypocrisy, capable how is it to repress Hyde, the one who is "hidden", while enjoying ignoble (and indefinite) gratifications through him. He embodies the prototype of the scientist who Faustianly rises above others by sublimating in his research of "transcendental medicine", in the inescapable gesture, the liberation of repressed instincts."

"The orientalist vision of the Holy Scriptures even becomes popular with the illustrated editions of the Bible, from that of Gustave Doré of 1866, imaginative but with precise oriental references, to the very widespread one edited by [[James Tissot] ], which includes views of the cities, maps, architectural reconstructions and topographical surveys of the sacred stations with the aim of making biblical archeology reliable, otherwise distorted, as the curator claims, by the fervent imagination of the artists. In one sense or another, the drive to seek the living testimonies of the Holy Scriptures in the Eastern reality of the moment, and to permeate a disenchanted West, was relaunched in the second half of the nineteenth century by the neo-spiritualist attempt to reaffirm the primacy of faith in the era of scientific materialism ."

"[...] represents the breaking of the integrity of the person, the splitting of good from evil, and above all the birth of a man's dialogic relationship with himself. Here, as in the best pages on the splitting of consciousness, Stevenson experiments with the principle so dear to the novel of adventure and mystery, and made intensely problematic by Dostoevsky's work, according to which everything in man lives on the border of its opposite: nobility of soul thrives on the border with abjection, love on the borders of hatred, good on those of evil. In these terms Markheim's confession to himself takes place in the tragic doubling on the fatal threshold [...]."