Umberto Eco and the Open Text: Semiotics, Fiction, Popular Culture [Hardcover]

"Peter Bondanella's Umberto Eco and the Open Text, an extremely intelligent, well-researched monograph and the most lucid study on Umberto Eco to date, was certainly well worth the wait. Peter Bondanella's study of Umberto Eco is a invaluable guide for anyone who wishes to understand and appreciate one of the wittiest and most erudite, intelligent, and entertaining intellectuals of our time." Rocco Capozzi, World Literature Today

"Bondanella's book amounts to a masterful sketch of Italian and Western intellectual history from the early 1950's to the present." The Comparatist

Umberto Eco is Italy's most famous living intellectual, known among academics for his literary and cultural theories, and to an enormous international audience through his novels, The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before. Umberto Eco and the Open Text is the first comprehensive study in English of Eco's work. In clear and accessible language, Peter Bondanella considers not only Eco's most famous texts, but also many occasional essays not yet translated into English. Tracing Eco's intellectual development from early studies in medieval aesthetics to seminal works on popular culture, postmodern fiction, and semiotic theory, he shows how Eco's own fiction grows out of his literary and cultural theories. Bondanella cites all texts in English, and provides a full bibliography of works by and about Eco.

This is the first comprehensive study in English of the works of Umberto Eco, Italy's most famous living intellectual and author of The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before. Peter Bondanella traces the developing interests of Eco, arguably the most famous Italian writer since Dante, from medieval aesthetics to semiotics to popular culture, and shows how Eco's own fiction grows out of his literary and cultural theories.