Dirk Vanden Berghe

Dirk Vanden Berghe's research focuses on late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth-century Italian literature, often with a stylistic and intertextual approach. He has published on the work of poets-translators both of proto-romantic works (more specifically on Gessner’s Idyllen, on Ossian’s Poems) and of classics (the Iliad translated after Vincenzo Monti’s adaptation; the Aeneid; Shakespeare in early Italian translations). A series of his publications invesigate the influence of Monti’s work on Giacomo Leopardi. Together with Claudio Gigante he edited the volume Il romanzo del Risorgimento (Brussels, Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes – Peter Lang, 2011). Regarding the 20th century, he studied the Florentine pre-WWI culture, especially the work of Ardengo Soffici, and dedicated a large amount of essays and a monograph to this writer (Ardengo Soffici dal romano al «puro lirismo», 2 volumes, Firenze, Olschki, 1997).