MLR, 105.2, 2010 579 are integrated into a full lexical database of Paduan dialect literature from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. This volume is undoubtedly a welcome addition to our knowledge and under standing of themost remarkable author-actor of the Italian Renaissance. This is especially so textually, in itsbringing a significant and neglected work?in terms of theatre and ideas?to an anglophone audience, and in its raising provocative questions about the degree of daring and the limits of the polemical in Ruzante. At times, though, Carroll's (con)textual commentary and conclusions needed tobe more cautious or nuanced. Our knowledge of the relationship between themanu scripts, and between these and thefirsteditions, is still awork-in-progress, as isour grasp of the significance of the linguistic variants in the Beolco corpus in the ab sence of autograph texts and a secure Ruzantian usus scribendi. Our understanding of the playwright's complex network of patronage remains fragmentary. University of St Andrews Ronnie Ferguson Beyond theFamily Romance: The Legend ofPascoli. ByMaria Truglio. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2007. viii+203 pp. $45;?28. ISBN 978-0 8020-9191-8. Inmoving 'beyond the family romance', Maria Truglio's study ofGiovanni Pascoli seeks to break with the dominant mode of biographical scholarship on the author while also engaging psychoanalytical theory (especially Freud) beyond applied criticism. In following a predominantly structural model, Truglio does not advo cate a Freudian interpretation of Pascoli's texts somuch as consider the common preoccupation with origins, and especially with loss, shared by these two near contemporaries. Thus, Pascoli's poetry is just one thread of a wider argument that embraces such diverse subjects as sexuality, infanticide, and the relationship between science and religion, while skilfully bringing them back to the central nexus between the self and primordial sites of trauma. It is an ambitious project in which a unified methodology helps provide thematic coherence. Beginning by citing theOrpheus myth, Truglio establishes the dangers implicit in the backward look that leads both Pascoli and Freud into the search for an ori ginating moment that, likeEurydice, proves tobe slippery, intangible, and, inmany respects, infernal' (p. 3), a trope that recurs as a structuringmotif in her analysis as awhole. 'Turning back' proves to be a privileged path both to rediscovering the lost object and losing itagain, and Freud's concept of the 'uncanny' (as elaborated in his essay 'Das Unheimlich') ispresented as the central paradigm explaining the double moments of possession and dispossession, familiarity and strangeness that also shape the Pascolian poetic universe. The uncanny is examined in relation to the very space of origins?respectively, inPascoli, thenest (both cradle and grave), parent (absent fatheror abject mother), or nature (consoling and threatening)?that betrays an ambivalence or doubleness at themoment inwhich the subject would be constituted as whole ormeaningful. Rereading the complex poetics of Pascoli's IIfanciullino in the light of its struc 580 Reviews tural parallels with Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and revisiting Agamben's thesis on Pascoli's language as a Tingua morta', Truglio suggests that the pre-grammatical, ana-logical linguaggio (p. 46) that thefanciullino speaks, which lies at the very border ofmeaning and non-meaning, reactivates something akin to theKristevan 'semiotic chora\ rehearsing inparticularly intense fashion the identity of poetry as themiddle space ofmemory and desire, and the constituting annihilation of the self. In thisway, she convincingly argues for an interpretation of desire in Pascoli beyond the purely sexual (towhich some existing psychoana lytic readings, for example Gioanola's, have been limited) and demonstrates how impulses towards regression and return dovetail with the desire to keep the dead alive and the concomitant refusal tomourn. It is significant in this respect that the chapters of the study,while moving forward, proceed to take us ever furtherback. Beginning from the assassination of the father and the uncanniness of the nest, we move through the double space of borderline identities?the phantasmatic presences of the poetry of the scapigliati (especially Tarchetti and Boito) and Pascoli's own cari morti; the abject or infanti cidal mother?finally regressing to themyth (more ideal than real) of theGolden Age, a point of origin that reveals itself...