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Birgitte Grundtvig, Martin McLaughlin and Lene Waage Petersen, eds. Image, Eye and Art in Calvino: Writing Visibility.

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Birgitte Grundtvig, Martin McLaughlin and Lene Waage Petersen, eds. Image, Eye and Art in Calvino: Writing Visibility. Oxford: Legenda, 2007.

Image, Eye and Art in Calvino: Writing Visibility is a significant and pioneering contribution to Calvino studies. What began as an international conference on the role of the visual and textual in Calvino in Copenhagen in 2004 is crystallized into an edited volume that speaks to and engages with the tension between word and image in the author's work. Truly interdisciplinary in nature, Image, Eye and Art brings together twenty scholars and visual artists from close to ten countries. What makes this volume a unique and welcome addition to countless works on the Italian novelist, journalist, essayist and short story writer whose humorous, fantastic and experimental tales make him one of the twentieth centuries' most important and popular writers, is the depth and breadth of critical approaches contained therein. Key themes of the volume--the role of the image in Calvino's texts, how literature imagines the world, the meaning of art to the author and ekphrasis--are approached through the fields of literary analysis, art theory and practice, semiotics, neuroscience, and translation studies. Moreover, the volume is enriched by two of Calvino's most important ekphrastic essays (previously hard to find in translation) and two invaluable contributions by Esther Calvino; the...