This book is a ten-step journey around the thought and poetry of the most sensitive Italian visionary of modernity, Giacomo Leopardi, whose contribution to Western thought has been acclaimed by admirers from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Benjamin. A variety of readings, moving between different disciplines and approaches - including film studies, psychoanalysis, and queer theory - shed new light on Leopardis fascinating and at the same time epistemologically radical compound of poetic imagination and philosophical complexity. An advocate of an ultra-philosophy, which aims to negotiate the fracture opened in Western imagination by the irrecoverable loss of ancient «illusions», Leopardis thought seems more relevant than ever in the post-human era, offering an (un)timely meditation on desire, suffering, and imagination as the foundational features of humanity.

Fabio Camilletti is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Warwick and Honorary Research Fellow at the Leopardi Centre, University of Birmingham. He has worked extensively on European literature of the Romantic age and has recently completed two monographs on Leopardi and Italian Romanticism. Paola Cori is Honorary Research Fellow at the Leopardi Centre, University of Birmingham. She completed her PhD at Birmingham and was awarded a Giacomo Leopardi Prize by the Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani. She has published articles in leading international journals and she is currently working on two monographs on Leopardi.

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