Midday In Italian Literature

Although midday is commonly associated with indolence or the languishing of both nature and humanity in stifling heat, Nicolas Perella shows that this connection—however real—is secondary to an archetypal encounter with noontide as a moment of existential crisis of spiritual as well as erotic dimensions. First tracing the literary presence of this image from classical and biblical antiquity to Nietzsche and other modern writers, he then analyzes the preoccupation with midday in the imagination o