Irene Chirico is Associate Professor of Italian Literature (L-FIL-LET / 10) at the Department of Human, Philosophical and Education Sciences of the University of Salerno in the Bachelor’s Degree in Educational Sciences and in the Master’s Degree Course in single cycle in Primary Education Sciences. The scientific work has involved different research paths along a time span that extends from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century as follows: critical and hermeneutic reading of chants from Dante’s text, with particular attention to its “fortune” and the contribution of the work of Dante in the formation and definition of culture and national identity; influence of medieval and humanistic translations on the origins and outcomes of Italian humanism; contribution of the political treaties of the southern area between Humanism and the Renaissance to the debate that has developed over the last five centuries – in Italy and in Europe – around Machiavelli’s Prince, as the most representative text and at the same time richer in developments, even contradictory ones; critical reading of the treatises of the second half of the sixteenth century relating to the characters of the comic genre within the humanistic debate on the definition of literary genres; studies relating to the musical drama of the Baroque period also through the analysis and edition of an unpublished text; the literary phenomenon produced by the Grand Tour also in relation to lesser known areas of Campania; the reinvention of the past in the eighteenth-century novel and the relationship between the different expressive strategies in the novel by Tozzi and Calvino; investigation of the persistence of Desanctisian critical approach in contemporary literary criticism.
