Philology and history of literature

The SFLI 2025, Society of Philologists of Italian Literature conference on the topic of Philology and History of Literature is scheduled for Sept. 18-2025 in Naples.

Five sessions over three days will begin on Sept. 18 in the Aula Magna of the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Via Mezzocannone, 4. Opening the proceedings at 10 a.m. will be Matteo Lorito, Rector of the University of Naples Federico II; Arturo De Vivo, Head of the Scuola Superiore Meridionale; Gaetano Manfredi, Mayor of Naples and President of ANCI; and Andrea Mazzucchi, President of the Society of Philologists of Italian Literature.

Since its act of birth, the Italian philological tradition has promoted a critical method that combines the ascertainment of textual data and the rigor of genealogical reconstructions with the interpretation and correct placement of literary products in an overall historiographical vision.

The SFLI 2025 conference aims to encourage a shared reflection among scholars and scholars of philology and literary history to return to questions around the stringent relationship that editorial practices, the study of tradition and the exegesis of texts entertain with the reconstruction of processes that invest forms, poetics, authors, institutions and cultural phenomena over time. The contributions will offer methodological reflections and case studies related to the entire span of our literary tradition (from the thirteenth century to contemporary times) with an eye toward discussing the repercussions that ecdotal praxis and awareness of the historicity of texts can have on the articulation of the canon, on the needs of periodization, on the geographical implications of historical processes, and on the definition of categories useful for the full understanding of the phenomena of continuity and fracture that characterize literary facts in the long term.

The aim is to verify the role of textual criticism and its working tools in the system of humanistic knowledge through close dialogue not only with other disciplines (from Italianistics to the history of language, from history to literary theory and comparative literatures, from Romance philology to contemporary studies) but also with the solicitations coming from humanities departments outside Italy, where the specificity of modern philological research is called to measure itself-and hopefully to integrate-with methodological perspectives that are intended to be complementary, such as social and mental history, cultural studies, gender studies and so on.

Detailed program of the three-day event