
The Italian Gothic and Fantastic
Encounters and Rewritings of Narrative Traditions
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published on 1. September 2007
Book
Hardback
243 pages
978-1-61147-353-7 (ISBN)
Description
This volume investigates modes of the reception, rewriting, and appropriation of the gothic and the fantastic in Italy in the late nineteenth century and the second half of the twentieth century. It articulates the ways in which Italian writers both undermined the narrative spaces created by realist narration and introduced agnoseological dimension centered on a disempowered and disjointed subjectivity. It argues that both in their breaking of nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic and literary paradigms and in their radical questioning of personal, collective, ideological, and literary identities, the gothic and the fantastic become forces of subversion. The identity resulting from this hermeneutic engagement is defined not by coincidence, but by difference: both collective and subjective identities must activate a process of negotiation that has to assimilate the Other in the spaces between the real and the unreal. Meanwhile, by assimilating the Other into our own modes of representation of reality and imagination, twentieth century female writers of the fantastic show how alternative identities can be shaped and social constituencies can be challenged.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cranbury
United States
Publishing group
Associated University Presses
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 244 mm
Width: 168 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
538 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-61147-353-7 (9781611473537)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Francesca Billiani is a lecturer in Italian studies at the University of Manchester.
Gigliola Sulis is a lecturer in Italian literature at the University of Leeds.
Gigliola Sulis is a lecturer in Italian literature at the University of Leeds.