In 2013-14 the module will specifically focus on representations of feminine death in the Italian fin de siècle at the intersection between literature, science, and the visual arts. The very origins of the Italian literary canon are marked by the death of two poets' ladies characterized by angelic features, Beatrice - mourned in Dante's Vita Nova and later re-transigured in the imagined afterlife of the Comedy - and Laura, whose loss is lamented in Petrarch's Canzoniere. In Arrigo Boito's poem Lezione d'anatomia (1865) we are equally made beheld the corpse of an angel-like image of femininity: the context, however, is now the aseptic one of the morgue, and the feminine body is made become an emblem of a disjointed relationship between poetry and experience. By moving from the analysis of Boito's poem, we will cover texts, among others, by Carlo Collodi, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Carlo Dossi, and the poets of Italian Symbolism, asking ourselves how the feminine motionless body is constructed as a site of absolute alterity, raising significant questions in terms of literary theory, metaphysics, and gender. We will also keep a strongly comparative perspective, which will be articulated in two directions. On the one hand, we will stress the contiguity and the inter-cultural exchanges between the Italian fin de siècle and the European literary and artistic scene, including French Symbolism, the English Pre-Raphaelites, and Central European culture. On the other hand, the module will try to reconstruct the ways Italian late-nineteenth-century literature re-elaborates and metamorphoses the texts of tradition such as Dante's Vita Nova and Petrarch's Canzoniere in order to frame quintessentially modern questions about love, desire, death, and loss in the light of courtly love and its feminine ideal of the 'Lady'.