The ten essays in this anthology aim to introduce the reader to the wide range of critical problems associated with Umberto Eco's literary, philosophical, and cultural writings. only one other Italian thinker has exerted such an enormous influence over Italian culture in the twentieth century – Benedetto Croce – and Croce never turned his hand to fiction. The breadth and scope of Eco's writings qualify him as what the Italians call a tuttologo – someone who knows something important about virtually everything. For any student of Eco, it seems that he has read practically everything in print in a variety of original languages and disciplines and, even more amazing, he has remembered it all! His effortless combination of matchless erudition and a wonderful sense of humor sets him apart from equally cerebral Italian writers such as Italo Calvino or Primo Levi, whose postmodern novels lack Eco's wit and sense of irony.

Norma Bouchard's contribution provides a survey of Eco's very early interest in popular culture (comic books, popular song, film, cartoons), a field that was more often identified with Anglo-American scholarship than with Italian writing when Eco began to publish on the subject. It is fair to say that with Eco's treatment of such iconic popular culture figures as Superman, James Bond, and Peanuts, Italian culture began to examine its own popular culture roots. But Eco's interest in cultural theory also produced literary results: his fifth novel (The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: An Illustrated Novel) provides an encyclopedic perspective upon the popular culture of Eco's adolescence during the Fascist period.