Litanic verse is based on different syntactic and rhetorical devices, such as enumeration, parallelism, anaphora, and epiphora. Its Italian variants are not to be seen as a mere convention of versification, but as a multifactorial phenomenon, which involves semantic and performative aspects as well. The variants reveal their different faces within various periods, beginning with the Duecento. This book analyzes Italian poetry up until the first decades of the twentieth century, together with certain musical pieces that are closely related to the history of literature. The monograph is the fourth of five volumes devoted to the emergence and development of litanic verse in the literature of European regions.

Magdalena Maria Kubas received her Ph.D. from the University for Foreigners of Siena, Italy. She specializes in spiritual poetry, the relations between poetry and music, and twentieth-century Italian literature.