Academic & Teaching staff

Dr Olivia Santovetti

Lecturer

Dr Olivia Santovetti

+44 (0)113 343 3635

Biography

My main interest is in the novel: its structure, its history and its culture. After a degree in Philosophy from the University of Rome, 'La Sapienza', I completed an MPhil in European Literature and a PhD at the University of Cambridge. The thesis examined the workings of digression in Italian literature from the birth of the modern novel in the early nineteenth century to the era of post-modernist experimentation. My aim was to explore the tensions digression engenders in the novel, by creating extra time within narration, disrupting the readers' expectations, and generating an act of reflection upon the narrative process itself. The approach was comparative, and referred to the work of other digressive authors, including Cervantes, Sterne and Diderot. This research was elaborated in my recent monograph: Digression: A Narrative Strategy in the Italian Novel (Bern: Lang, 2007).

I have published on Manzoni, Dossi, Pirandello, Gadda and Calvino. I have also published work on Laurence Sterne, and edited and translated a selection of his Sermons for Signorelli (1994) and for Mondadori (a section of the 'Meridiani' volume on Laurence Sterne, to be published in 2008). Before joining the University of Leeds, I was an Affiliated Lecturer and then Leverhulme Fellow at the Department of Italian of the University of Cambridge.

Teaching

Level Module
Level 1 Reading Italian Literature A
Level 1 Italian Language A
Level 2 Tall Tales
Level 2 Italy: Regions, Identities and Nation
Level 3 Italo Calvino
Level 3 Italian Language B

Research and selected publications

Monograph

  • Digression: A Narrative Strategy in the Italian Novel from Manzoni to Calvino (Bern: Lang, 2007).

Edited and translated volume

  • Laurence Sterne. Dieci sermoni di Mr Yorick (Rome: Signorelli, 1993).

Book Chapters and Journal Articles

  • 'Ottocento', in The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, 72 (2010), pp.295-306, forthcoming.
  • 'Straight Line or Aimless Wandering? Italo Calvino's Way to Digression', in Digression in European Literature. From Cervantes to Sebald, edited byAlexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp.169-180.
  • 'Italian Digressions', in Textual Wanderings: The Theory and Practice of Narrative Digression, edited by Rhian Atkin (Oxford; Bern: Legenda, 2011), pp.47-63.
  • 'The Cliché of the Romantic Female Reader and the Paradox of Novelistic Illusion: Federico De Roberto's L'illusione (1891)', in The Printed Media in Fin-de-siècle Italy. Publishers, Writers, and Readers, ed. by Ann Hallamore Caesar, Gabriella Romani, and Jennifer Burns (Oxford; Bern: Legenda, 2011), pp.49-63.
  • 'On the Minute Particle 'If' and the Many Disruptions It Might Cause', Pirandello Studies, vol.29 (2009), pp.29-37.
  • 'The Sentimental, the 'Inconclusive', the Digressive: Sterne in Italy', in The Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe ed. by Peter de Voogd and John Neubauer and part of the series The Reception of British Authors in Europe (The Continuum International Publishing Group: London, 2004), pp. 192-220.
  • '"Viluppi", "Intoppi", and "Tranelli" : Traps for the reader in Carlo Dossi's texts', Italian Studies, 63 (2003), 88-103.
  • 'Digressive art as humorous art? Luigi Pirandello's Uno, nessuno e centomila', Pirandello Studies, 20 (2000), 117-134.
  • Anne Bandry and Olivia Santovetti, 'Thomas Twining Reads Tristram Shandy', The Shandean, 11 (1999-2000), 135-46.

  • 'The Adventurous Journey of Lorenzo Sterne in Italy', The Shandean, 8 (1996), pp. 78-97.

  • 'Rovello' and 'Traviamento', entries in the Dizionario tematico di letteratura ed. by Remo Ceserani, Mario Domenichelli and Pino Fasano (Turin: UTET, forthcoming).

Conference and Seminar Organisation

  • Co-organizer of a conference on De Roberto (St John's College, Cambridge, 22-23 March 2007).
  • Co-organiser of Senses of Humour, Conference on Humour in Italian Literature (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 8 March 2000).
  • Organiser of Un uomo che forse si chiamava Shultz, visit of author Ugo Riccarelli (St John's College, Cambridge, 11 December 1998).
  • Co-organiser of The Fantastic in Italy, (Newnham College, Cambridge, 2 May 1998) 

Research supervision

The areas in which I can supervise research include eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian authors.