It is now generally acknowledged that Pier Paolo Pasolini stands as Italy's major post-war intellectual. This collection of essays, without claiming to provide an overall assessment of his career, aims to provide a clear sense of the range and complexity of his achievements. The book is divided into two sections. 'Surveys' examines some of the major components of Pasolini's cultural experience: his obsession with himself, with language, with reality and with rewriting; his problematic assimilation of Croce and Gramsci; his work as a cultural theorist. 'Studies' provides detailed analyses of some of his most important works: his dialect verse, his Roman prose, his film adaptations from St Matthew and from Chaucer, his plays and his late polemical journalism. These texts have been chosen to reflect the whole of his career, from the early 1940s to 1975 (the year of his death), and to focus on different areas of his artistic and intellectual activity. In this way the two parts of the book integrate and offer a broad insight into Pasolini's oeuvre. The Introduction, by exploring Pasolini's influence and reception during the last twenty years or so, sets the tone for the collection's attempt to merge the general with the particular.
Zygmunt Baranski is professor of Italian studies at the University of Reading.
