Modernism in Trieste

When we think about the process of European unification, our conversations inevitably ponder questions of economic cooperation and international politics. Salvatore Pappalardo offers a new and engaging perspective, arguing that the idea of European unity is also the product of a modern literary imagination. This book examines the idea of Europe in the modernist literature of primarily Robert Musil, Italo Svevo, and James Joyce (but also of Theodor Däubler and Srecko Kosovel), all authors who had a deep connection with the port city of Trieste. Writing after World War I, when the contested city joined Italy, these authors resisted the easy nostalgia of the postwar period, radically reimagining the origins of Europe in the Mediterranean culture of the Phoenicians, contrasting a 19th-century nationalist discourse that saw Europe as the heir of a Greek and Roman legacy. These writers saw the Adriatic city, a cosmopolitan bazaar under the Habsburg Empire, as a social laboratory of European integration. Modernism in Trieste seeks to fill a critical gap in the extant scholarship, securing the literary history of Trieste within the context of current research on Habsburg and Austrian literature.

Pappalardo’s book is one of the most innovative and multidisciplinary works to have been written about Trieste ... A precious addition to both comparative and modernist studies., This is a brilliant and insightful study of modernist literature and politics unified by the complex culture of Trieste. Having previously read the works by Magris, Musil, Joyce, and Svevo that Pappalardo analyzes, I found many of his observations so revelatory that I hope to return to these authors in the future. I can think of no greater praise for a book of literary criticism., It would be hard to overstate the timeliness of a work that explores the literary invention of Europe at a time when the very question of ‘what it means to be, or who gets to be, European’ has come under such renewed pressure. That is what Salvatore Pappalardo’s Modernism in Trieste does: casting its net over a period that stretches from the fin de siècle to the Second World War, Modernism in Trieste interrogates how literary modernism ‘invented’ a united, nonnational Europe avant la lettre. ... Modernism in Trieste is a long overdue intervention in the field, restoring this peripheral city to its place of merit among other capitals of modernism in modernist studies. ... The book can therefore be of value to scholars in Modernist, Mediterranean, and Habsburg studies alike — so many, and so varied, are indeed the disciplinary threads that Pappalardo deftly interweaves., Modernism in Trieste is a thoroughly enjoyable read, pulling together a diverse cast of characters and illuminating the Habsburg legacy for European consciousness from a stimulating range of ethic, national, cultural and linguistic perspectives—Austrian, German, Italian, Slavic, Jewish and even Irish. Pappalardo succeeds admirably in his stated goal of reclaiming Trieste for Austrian and Habsburg studies ... It will be read profitably by all those interested in thinking creatively about the Habsburg legacy for Europe., Compelling and original.

Salvatore Pappalardo is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Towson University, USA, where he teaches courses that range from the ancient Mediterranean to modern world literature. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature, Austrian and Italian modernism, and Mediterranean Studies.