Alessandro Mengozzi

Esterino Adami

Francesca Bellino

The papers collected in this volume deal with the explorations of Science Fiction, Fantasy and, more generally, the representation of otherness through the narrative construction of fantastic, imaginary, appalling or attractive places, stories and figures. Contributions are arranged in four main sections. The first section (Other spaces, new worlds) deals with Hindi and Arabic Science Fiction. The second section (Constructing forms of otherness) analyses the narrative and psychological mechanisms that give forms to a stereotype or archetypical image of the threatening Other. The third section ((Re)shaping style(s), language(s) and discourse(s) of otherness) is centred on the idea of language as a tool to build up styles, genres and texts, and literature as an escape from disappointing history and a cross-cultural wandering space of narrative ghosts. The fourth section (Circulating fearful otherness) tests the limits and heuristic potential of a philological approach in reconstructing the wide circulation of motifs and characters from antiquity to (post-)modernity.

Other worlds and the narrative construction of otherness

This volume examines the train trope in a variety of cultural, literary and linguistic contexts, from contemporary crime fiction and dystopian graphic narratives to postcolonial railway travelogues, by employing a range of methods and frameworks. Situated within the “Discourse, Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics” collection, the book critically engages with significant areas such as discourse and narrative structure. Interpreting the railway as a powerful cultural and imaginary site in the English-speaking world that traverses a range of creative domains, this study explores the ways in which the train and its structures, symbols and metaphors are textually rendered and the type of stylistic effects they generate in readers. It introduces, frames and discusses the idea of railway discourse and focuses on specific case studies (The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, the graphic novel Snowpiercer and Monisha Rajesh’s Around India in 80 Trains). In particular, it considers how a compartment window can constrain, and shape, the point of view of a narrator, the way in which science fiction trains are conceptually imagined, and the intercultural implications of rail travel writing in India today. To analyse the role and meaning of the railway in these texts, and compare them with others, this work adopts and adapts analytical tools and critical concepts from the integration of different fields, such as stylistics and linguistics, postcolonial criticism and literary studies.

Esterino Adami

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