Strumenti Critici

About Strumenti Critici

Strumenti Critici — Journal Profile

Strumenti Critici is an Italian-language journal of literary theory, textual criticism and literary history, published by Società Editrice Il Mulino of Bologna, Italy. Its print ISSN is 0039-2618 and its electronic ISSN is 2612-0925, the pair carried on this JournalsWorld record and confirmed by its OpenAlex source record, which gives 0039-2618 as the linking ISSN and the publisher's journal page at mulino.it as the homepage. Appearing three times a year, the journal describes itself, in the publisher's Rivisteweb platform text quoted in this profile, as one of the journals that has played a key role in redefining the scene of Italian literary criticism, in both methodological thinking and critical research — and a run that reaches from the 1960s to a current issue in 2026, still publishing studies of Leopardi, Tasso, Calvino and Fogazzaro alongside letters of Leo Spitzer, gives that claim substance. The standard abbreviation is Strum. Crit. (Strumenti Critici), and every article carries a DOI in the publisher's 10.1419 series, visible throughout its Rivisteweb tables of contents.

For readers outside Italian studies, the title needs a sentence of translation and a sentence of context. "Strumenti critici" means "critical instruments" or "critical tools" — the methods, concepts and philological equipment with which literature is studied — and the name is a programme: this is a journal about how criticism works as much as about the works criticised. It belongs to the strong Italian tradition in which philology, textual scholarship and literary theory are practised as one discipline, and its natural companions on a library shelf are the other historic Italian riviste of literary study. This profile covers its identity and history as far as the fetched record establishes it, its publisher and platform, its scope as the publisher states it and as its recent issues display it, its editorial ethics framework, its metrics with sources kept separate, and practical guidance for scholars who want to read, cite or approach it.

At a Glance

• Full title: Strumenti Critici
• Abbreviation: Strum. Crit.
• Print ISSN: 0039-2618
• Electronic ISSN: 2612-0925 (OpenAlex source record)
• Publisher: Società Editrice Il Mulino, Strada Maggiore 37, 40125 Bologna, Italy
• Platform: Rivisteweb (Il Mulino's journal platform); journal page at mulino.it under ISSN 0039-2618
• Language: Italian, with contributions also appearing in other languages in its tables of contents
• Frequency: Three issues a year
• Field: Literary theory, textual criticism, philology, Italian and comparative literature
• Publication history: OpenAlex records a first publication year of 1966; the publisher's platform shows the journal current in 2026 (issue 2/2026)
• Article identifiers: DOI with the prefix 10.1419 (Il Mulino)
• Open access: No; a subscription journal on Rivisteweb, with some platform content marked open access at article level
• Article processing charge: Not published — no APC information could be verified from a fetched source

Publisher and Platform: Il Mulino and Rivisteweb

Società Editrice Il Mulino, based at Strada Maggiore 37 in Bologna, is one of Italy's principal scholarly publishers, with a catalogue spanning the humanities and social sciences in both books and journals. Its journal platform, Rivisteweb, is where Strumenti Critici lives online: the platform carries the journal's description, its current and back issues with full tables of contents, article-level DOIs, and the contributor notes ("Notizie sui collaboratori") that close each issue. Browsing the platform record fetched for this profile shows a journal in full working order — issue 2/2026 already published with a complete table of contents, issue 1/2026 before it, and a digitised back run in which individual older issues, such as numbers from 2018 to 2022, present their contributor notes as open-access items. Authors and librarians should treat Rivisteweb, reached through the ISSN address the publisher itself uses, as the journal's authoritative online home; the older habit of citing the journal as a print-only object no longer matches how its contents are actually found and cited, which is by DOI.

The platform also carries the ethics framework under which the journal operates. Rivisteweb states that the journals on the platform adopt and promote publisher ethics guidelines (PEMS), and that its ethics statements are based on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors. That is the extent of the editorial-process information the publisher's public pages state for this title, and this profile reports it as such: no public page fetched for this research sets out a named peer-review model, a current editorial board list or submission instructions for Strumenti Critici, so none is invented here. Scholars who need those details — above all, prospective contributors — should obtain them from Il Mulino's journal office, whose contact route runs through the journal's pages on mulino.it and Rivisteweb.

Scope as the Publisher States It

The journal's own description on Rivisteweb, in the publisher's English rendering, says that Strumenti Critici "is one of the journals that has played a key role in redefining the scene of Italian literary criticism, in terms of both methodological thinking and critical research", that by maintaining its "militant" nature through greater openness it "keeps its proponent capacity intact, especially in the field of literary theory and textual criticism", and that it "includes scholarly articles and authoritative studies relevant to contemporary and comparative literature, while at the same time combining philological and textual rigour with wide-ranging critical perspectives". Three claims in that short text repay attention. The first is historical: the journal presents itself as an actor in the methodological renewal of Italian criticism, not merely a container for it. The second is temperamental: "militant" is the publisher's own word, signalling a journal with positions, willing to argue for methods rather than merely host them. The third is structural: theory and textual criticism are named first, contemporary and comparative literature are the fields of application, and philological rigour is the discipline that binds them.

Scope as Its Recent Issues Display It

The table of contents of issue 2/2026, fetched in full from Rivisteweb for this profile, lets a reader test the publisher's description against practice. The issue opens with studies that are textual and archival in character: the history, dating and critical hypotheses around Giacomo Leopardi's "Supplemento generale a tutte le mie carte", and a body of letters from Leo Spitzer to Giulio Bertoni written between 1912 and 1938, presented under Spitzer's own declaration of love for Italian philology. Method-driven readings follow: an alchemical-structured reading of Boccaccio's tale of Andreuccio da Perugia from the Decameron; a study of trauma and catharsis in the making of Luigi Meneghello's "Bau-sète!"; an essay on lyrical vagueness in the sacred part of Torquato Tasso's Rhymes; a narratological essay on the knot as an elusive object between thematics, figurality and narratology; and a reconstruction of Italo Calvino's multimedia rewriting of the Orlando Furioso, with an appendix recovering the three lost episodes of his 1968 radio programme. Fogazzaro's "Psychological Library" is read as the light in which to see his call for a new science. The pattern across the issue is exactly the publisher's formula: canonical Italian texts from Boccaccio to Calvino, treated with archival evidence where it exists, and with an explicit theoretical instrument — narratology, thematics, genetic and textual criticism, reception through other media — named and used rather than assumed.

Issue 1/2024, also visible in the platform record, was built around Alberto Arbasino, with essays on his Proustian pastiche, on the Satyricon as hypotext in Fratelli d'Italia, on the Arbasino fund at the Gabinetto Vieusseux, and a documentary section printing six letters and a postcard from Arbasino to Carlo Bo spanning 1948 to 2000. The willingness to devote an issue's core to one contemporary author, treated simultaneously as a literary case and as an archive, is characteristic. So is the presence, in the 3/2024 issue, of work in other languages and on other literatures — Christa Wolf's Stadt der Engel read through Brecht's exile, Roberto Roversi's lyrics for Lucio Dalla's songs analysed critically and textually — which confirms that "comparative" in the journal's self-description is practised, and that the journal's Italian language is a centre rather than a wall.

History — What the Fetched Record Establishes

OpenAlex gives 1966 as the source's first publication year, and a bookseller's record of a 1971 issue describes the journal in its fifth year (Anno V, No. 14, February 1971) as a four-monthly review of literary culture and criticism — a dating consistent with a 1966 or 1967 start, and a frequency, three numbers a year, that the journal still keeps. The same 1971 record names the journal's direction with D'Arco Silvio Avalle, the distinguished Romance philologist whose name is bound up with the journal's founding generation and with the methodological renewal the publisher's description invokes; later editorial history, including the names of subsequent directors and boards, could not be verified from fetched official pages for this profile and is therefore not narrated here, because inventing a masthead would be worse than omitting one. What stands on verified ground is the arc itself: a journal born in the years when Italian criticism was rearming itself methodologically, carried for decades by a major Bologna scholarly publisher, digitised on Rivisteweb with DOIs, and still, in 2026, filling three issues a year with philologically grounded, theoretically explicit work on Italian and comparative literature. In Italian academic life the journal also carries formal recognition: the OpenAlex source record lists it in the ANVUR Class A and scientific lists and in ERIH PLUS among its listings — ANVUR being the Italian national agency whose journal classifications matter for Italian academic evaluation — a detail Italian readers will register and foreign readers should have explained, as it is done here, rather than left as an unexplained badge.

Metrics and Indexing — Attributed and Kept Apart

OpenAlex. Resolved through the ISSN endpoint for 0039-2618, the OpenAlex source record (S4306530991) pairs the ISSNs 0039-2618 and 2612-0925, names the publisher's page at mulino.it as homepage, and records 1,106 works, 263 citations received, an h-index of 6, an i10-index of 6 and a two-year mean citedness of 0.0. Its own coverage in that record ends in 2021, although the journal demonstrably continues to 2026 on Rivisteweb — so OpenAlex's recent coverage of this title is incomplete, and its citation counts are a floor, not a measure. The record's topic analysis is more informative than its counts: Italian Literature and Culture accounts for the largest cluster of works, followed by Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics, Poetry Analysis and Criticism, and Classical Studies and Philology, a distribution that matches the journal's stated scope precisely.

Scopus-derived listings. The stored JournalsWorld record on this post, built from Scopus data, lists Scopus coverage of 2002–2025, a Q4 quartile in Literature and Literary Theory and an h-index of 3; third-party summaries of the same Scopus data give a CiteScore of 0.1 and an SJR of 0.1. Numbers of this size are the ordinary condition of a national-language philology journal, whose citations arrive slowly and largely inside a national scholarly conversation; they should be reported, as here, with their source and without apology or inflation. Separate listings also associate the title with the Emerging Sources Citation Index of Web of Science; because that association could not be verified from a Clarivate or publisher page fetched for this profile, it is recorded as a listing claim rather than asserted as a verified fact, and any reader who needs it for an evaluation file should confirm it in the Web of Science Master Journal List directly.

Directories and charges. A DOAJ search by ISSN carried out for this profile returned no record, consistent with a subscription journal distributed through a publisher platform. No article processing charge is published in any source fetched for this profile, and none is asserted here.

How Scholars Use This Journal

For researchers, the journal's main uses are three. First, as a source: its six decades of studies on Italian authors, texts and critical methods form part of the scholarly record that any serious bibliography on, for example, Leopardi's papers, Tasso's lyrics, Calvino's working methods or twentieth-century Italian narrative must reckon with, and its documentary sections — letters and archival materials printed with scholarly apparatus, from Spitzer's correspondence with Bertoni to Arbasino's with Carlo Bo — are primary material in their own right. Second, as a methods library: because the journal names and argues its instruments, its articles are a practical education in how Italian philology and textual criticism are done, useful to graduate students far beyond Italian studies. Third, as a venue: scholars of Italian and comparative literature with a textually grounded, methodologically explicit study — and the ability to publish in Italian or to have the work presented in Italian — may approach the publisher for its current submission arrangements, which, as noted, are not published on the pages fetched for this profile and must be obtained from Il Mulino directly. Review times, acceptance rates and formatting rules for this journal could not be verified and are therefore stated as could not be verified rather than guessed.

Similar and Related Journals

The journal's shelf-companions are the other long-established Italian reviews of literary study and philology, and the comparison that clarifies it best is by method rather than by title. Journals of Italian literary history share its archive-mindedness but not always its theoretical edge; journals of pure literary theory share its instruments but not its philological discipline; Strumenti Critici's identity is the overlap — theory accountable to texts, and texts read with declared methods. International readers arriving from JournalsWorld's other literary profiles will find the contrast instructive: where South Central Review gathers several national literatures and fields into one Anglophone society journal, and Southern Humanities Review publishes the creative work itself, Strumenti Critici represents the continental philological model, in which the study of literature is organised around editions, documents, language and method. All three are serious journals; they are serious in different scholarly grammars, and a bibliography that needs Italian material will sooner or later have to learn this one's grammar.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Strumenti Critici?
Print ISSN 0039-2618 and electronic ISSN 2612-0925, as paired in the OpenAlex source record and carried on this JournalsWorld record.

Who publishes Strumenti Critici?
Società Editrice Il Mulino, of Strada Maggiore 37, 40125 Bologna, Italy. Its online home is the publisher's Rivisteweb platform, with the journal page at mulino.it under its ISSN.

What does the title mean?
"Critical instruments" — the methods and tools of literary criticism. The name states the journal's programme: literary theory and textual criticism practised with philological rigour.

What subjects does it cover?
In the publisher's words, literary theory and textual criticism above all, with scholarly studies of contemporary and comparative literature. Its recent issues cover Italian literature from Boccaccio, Tasso and Leopardi to Fogazzaro, Calvino, Meneghello and Arbasino, alongside comparative and documentary work.

How often does it appear, and in what language?
Three issues a year. The language of the journal is Italian, with individual contributions also appearing in other languages, as its tables of contents show.

When did Strumenti Critici begin?
OpenAlex records a first publication year of 1966, and a 1971 issue is described in a contemporary record as its fifth year — consistent evidence for a mid-1960s founding. A fuller editorial history could not be verified from fetched official pages for this profile.

Is Strumenti Critici peer-reviewed?
The publisher's platform states that its journals operate under publisher ethics guidelines based on COPE's Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors. A named review model for this title is not stated on the public pages fetched for this profile, so no specific model is claimed here.

What are its metrics?
OpenAlex records 1,106 works, 263 citations and an h-index of 6, with its own coverage ending in 2021 despite the journal's continuation to 2026. Scopus-derived listings give coverage of 2002–2025, a Q4 quartile in Literature and Literary Theory, an h-index of 3 and a CiteScore of 0.1. Quote each figure only with its source.

Is Strumenti Critici open access, and does it charge authors?
It is a subscription journal on Rivisteweb; a DOAJ search by ISSN returned no record, and some platform items, such as contributor notes from back issues, are marked open access at item level. No article processing charge is published in any fetched source, and none is asserted here.

How do I submit or contact the journal?
Submission instructions were not published on the pages fetched for this profile and are recorded as could not be verified. Approach the journal through Il Mulino's journal pages on mulino.it and Rivisteweb, quoting ISSN 0039-2618.

Sources for this profile: the journal's pages on Rivisteweb, the Il Mulino platform (description, tables of contents for issues 2/2026, 1/2026, 1/2024 and 3/2024, and the platform ethics statement, fetched for this profile); the OpenAlex source record resolved via api.openalex.org/sources/issn:0039-2618 (source S4306530991); a DOAJ search by ISSN; a bookseller's bibliographic record of the 1971 issue for the early direction and frequency; and the stored JournalsWorld record together with Scopus-derived summaries for coverage, quartile and CiteScore context. Statements that could not be verified from a fetched source are marked as such in the text.