Teaching and Research Activities

Luigi Montella is Ordinary Professor of Italian Literature in the School of Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Department of Human, Social and Education Sciences, University of Molise. He is in possession of the National Scientific Ability to Professor of First Band in Italian Literature, achieved on 28/04/2018. Over the last years, he has taught Italian Philology and Literary Text Teaching Methodology. He has also taught Italian Literature and Italian Literature Education in the School for Prospective Secondary School Teachers (SSIS University of Molise and SICSI University of Salerno). In 2018 he was appointed by the Ministry of Education in the technical-scientific commission of the scholastic administration competition.

Over the years he has been invited to speak to doctoral students working in the humanities. He has been a member of research grants committees andof various national committees for the confirmation of associate professors.

His primary area of interest is sixteenth-and -seventeenth century poetry. In addition to archival research, special attention has been paid in this context to both the reconstruction and philological analysis of texts as well as to their adequate historical and literary interpretation.

A large corpus of previously unpublished texts has been edited, such as the sixteenth-century manuscripts by Laura Terracina (None Rime); Le Rime with the unpublished Antonio Muscettola’sPanegirico della Virtù; thePoesiesatiriche e giocose by Giulio Acciano which were published in the series “L’infinita durata”, directed by Giorgio Barberi Squarotti (Edizioni dell’Orso). Moreover, the critical study of this last collection of poems (in the form of idiographic manuscripts) is combined with textual comments and philological analysis; I Sonetti byBaldassarre Pisani, with both a careful reconstruction of the composition process and a particular attention to the evolution of the text in different printed editions.

He has also edited and widely commented the Sonettiby Antonio de 'Rossi (printed in 1661) giving prior attention to the vast and scarcely investigated study of the theories, theologies and interpretations of Christianity seen as development of the post-Tridentine Catholic reformcorpus. Through de’ Rossi’s poetic experience, he discussed the influence of these new concerns and theological investigations in Italy, and particularly in the South.

Stylistic and historical comments have been supplied for each poem. Moreover, an analysis of the dedicatees as well as of the events the poet is attempting to relate has been provided to better understand the occasions, the author’s stylistic choices and message, as well as the Baroque (‘Marinist’) concepts and metaphors and the prominence of ancient myths, customs, and real places with their rich symbolic implications.

 He ends his vast scholarly production devoted to the study of the sixteenth-and-seventeenth centuries with his essays on the theoretical correspondence between Bernardo and Torquato Tasso; the important role played by Paolo Beni in the debate between the cruscanti and anticruscanti; the satirical poetry by Bartolomeo Dotti; the poetry of Tommaso Gaudiosi and the role played bySecchia rapitaby Alessandro Tassoni within the 'modern' genre of mock-heroic poem.

To Vittorio Alfieri’s literary output, he has dedicated an original discussion of a scarcely known early poem, tracing the evolution of the text and the authorial intentions that were at its basis, along with an analysis of the stylistic and rhetorical processes that make Alfieri’s so distinctive, even today.
As concerns the research work on the nineteenth century literature, he directed his attention to Giacomo Leopardi’s relations with Italian literary tradition, to the presence of Leopardi in the poems of Giuseppe Ricciardi, the literary production of Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi, Federico Verdinois’ Racconti and to on the antirealistic vision of seventeenth-century poetry matured in the writings of Francesco de Sanctis.

He also edited the volume Studi e leggende popolari by Giuseppe Pitrè (National Edition of the Opere). In the introduction, he analyzes the style and the positivistic vision which guided the author's research effort, discussing the writer’s unusual perspective with regard to the literary and linguistic theories so popular among intellectuals of the time.

He has also addressed his scholarly activity to criticism, and to nineteenth-and-twentieth century literary production. As regards the first topic, he focuses on journal articles and periodicals, which have been investigated not only in their historical dimension, but also for the theoretical and methodological issues they present. As a result, he has published the following works: «Il Giornale letterario di Napoli (1793-1799)», «Il Caffè del molo (1829-1832)»(both works are part of a research project sponsored by the Department of Literature, Art, Performing Arts of the University of Salerno); Scrittura critica nell’attività giornalistica tra gli anni Quaranta-Settanta: Carlo Salinari, Manlio Cancogni, Aldo De Jaco.

With regard to the twentieth-century prose, he devoted to art writing a detailed historical and literary overview. Conversely, his full-length study on Giuseppe Raimondi is a philological and linguistic investigation that sheds lights on an unjustly neglected writer who should be considered among the best examples of the twentieth century tradition. In particular, Raimondi’s writings, published in journals in the years 1915-1930, have been collected for the first time. An analysis has been carried out on the morphological and semantic traits. In particular, great attention has been devoted to Raimondi’s different stylistic choices and their progressive evolution over time. The text reading had the primary aim to provide a definition of twentieth century prose (or criticism) overcominglongstanding dichotomies.

He has also worked on Italo Calvino. In particular, an attempt to provide an essential profile has been made, with the aim of revealing the common traits in his writings  departing from the manifold as significant previous works in the field. The principal objective was to supersede the idea of Calvino as a realistic and politically committed writer in the postwar era, with a tendency towards metatextual reflection in the 1980s.

Both the study on art writing and the works on Raimondi and Calvino shed light on the link between Italian literary production and European literary and linguistic tradition, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

On twentieth century literature, he wrote on the collection of fourteen poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini,Sonetto primaverile,on a scarcely known short story by Maria Teresa di Lascia (Veglia), and on George Barberi Squarotti’s poetry.

In the forthcoming study La lirica nella seconda metà del Seicento: tra pluriprospetticità e modernità della retorica,he analyzes the role of poetic form as an expression of the philosophical-theoretical debate, focusing on language experimentation. Finally, he is currently working on a critical edition ofLiber amatoriusby the humanist Antonio Forteguerri di Pistoia. The manuscripts (2892) have been already acquired from the Riccardiana of Florence. Some poems are also contained in the manuscript A 58 at the Forteguerrianna Library in Pistoia. It also includes T. Baldinotti’s rhymes, a cleric from Pistoia, author of two songbooks and various burlesque verses, who Forteguerri was in contact with. His rhymes addressed to Forteguerri are contained in the manuscripts A 58 and A 60 at the Forteguerriana Library. Forteguerri’s songsbook contains 212 sonnets and 8 songs, including several sestets and a ballad, which were probably transcribed for circulation among his friends. He is undertaking the transcription of the codice Riccardiano collection which consists of 277 sonnets, five songs and four sestets.

He is co-director of the series collana «Civiltà letteraria italiana»(Edisud Edizioni, Salerno). He is member of the editorial board of «Misure critiche»  and member of the Scientific Committee of the literature journal «Sinestesie»; in 2023 also member of the International Scientific Committee.

His reviews of important Italian literature studies have been published in several journals. Some of his works are quoted in journals, catalogs and international studies, as well as in bibliographic entries of the Storia della letteratura italiana (Salerno Editrice), in the Enciclopedia Treccani and in the national edition of Benedetto Croce’s Opere. His works have been also reviewed in the main Italian scientific journals (including GLI).