Franco MARUCCI

Franco Marucci, born in 1949, began academic work in 1974 as an assistant and associate professor at the University of Siena; he then taught  English at the University of Venice "Ca' Foscari" from 1987 to 2010. 

He co-organized in Venice international conferences on Hopkins (1989), Browning (1989), Pater (1994), and on "Myth Religion Ideology from Romanticism to Modernism" (1999). In 1996 he invited Nobel Prize Winner Derek Walcott to give a poetry reading.  In August 2000 he gave a semi-plenary lecture, entitled  "Morphology of the Mythic Remake", at the Fifth ESSE Conference in Helsinki.

He is a member of the Editorial Boards of "Rivista di Studi Vittoriani", "Hopkins Quarterly", "ES Revista de Filología Inglesa". He was also the director of the series "Le Bricole", published by Cisalpino (Milan) and Cafoscarina (Venice). 

Research interests

In the late Sixties, as an undergraduate at the University of Florence, he came under the impact of linguistics, formalism, structuralism and of the then-nascent semiotics. Yet he soon felt the need to overcome the limits of a strictly intratextual approach and to relate technique to context, as he proved in his first full-length study (on the poetry of Dylan Thomas, 1976), where linguistic and technical idiosyncrasy was traced back to the cultural, epistemological, social and political situation and to the poet's existential and biographical plight.

Subsequently, he integrated structuralism with non-Lacanian and non-deconstructive psychoanalysis in the attempt to "reinstate the author" and focus on the formative and cultural experiences concurring to the production of texts. The most seminal and durable influence has remained for him, however, that of the Cultural Typology of the Tartu School (and of Jury Lotman in particular), come into prominence in Europe in the early Seventies. This led to his most finished and substantial work, a book on Hopkins published in 1981 (revised, enlarged and updated English version, 1994).

His Storia della letteratura inglese is published by Le Lettere, Florence, in 8 volumes (2013-2017), and is now available in an unabridged translation  (Oxford, Peter Lang, 8 volumes in 18 Books, 2018-2019).

His most recent publication include:

 L’occhio del diavolo. Agoni, smarrimenti, riscatti nel cinema di Ingmar Bergman, Firenze, Nardini, 2020

Authors in Dialogue: Comparative Essays in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century English Literature, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2020.

R. L. Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, Il riflusso della marea, ed. F. Marucci, Roma, Elliott, 2020.

Letteratura inglese. Un profilo storico, Roma, Carocci, 2020.

Altomare, a novel,  Roma, Castelvecchi, 2020

Hitchcock. Il prurito della pistola, Vicenza, Ronzani, 2021 

George Eliot's 'The Lifted Veil': A Sequential and Contextual Reading, London, Routledge (forthcoming)​ 

J. Ruskin, La nube tempestosa, ed. F. Marucci, Roma, Castelvecchi (forthcoming).