Maurizio Ascari

Serena Baiesi

David Levente Palatinus

This book sheds new light on various interconnected aspects of the Gothic through the lens of converging critical and methodological approaches. With its interdisciplinary perspective, the authors explore the domains of literary, pictorial, filmic, televisual and popular cultural texts in English from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Contexts, Legacies, Media

Gothic Metamorphoses Across the Centuries

1944, Northern Italy. Antonio’s life is shattered when he is deported to Germany as a forced labourer. Thereafter, his joys consist of small things: being able to breathe, to feel the plaster of a wall with his fingers, and the hope that perhaps, one day, he will return to his world. The book, partly in the form of letters and postcards, reconstructs that former world and is itself an act of commemoration…

Faded Letters

Presents a study of crime fiction that takes a fresh look at its evolution, drawing on material from the Middle Ages onwards. This title explores the connections between revenge tragedies, the gothic, urban mysteries and anarchist fiction, and examines the influence of pseudo-sciences such as mesmerism and criminal anthropology.

Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational

A Counter-History of Crime Fiction

In this engaging new study, Maurizio Ascari reassesses Katherine Mansfield's literary career through the critical lens of silent film, showing how the author's imagination developed in a cultural climate which was informed by interart exchanges. In London Mansfield came in touch not only with avant-garde movements, but with the new medium of cinema, which exerted a deep fascination on her. Cinema helped Mansfield achieve a new form pivoting on impersonality and empathy, and, together with stories in which cinema is openly thematised, she wrote others which reveal a cinematic dimension in terms of narrative techniques. This critical work reassesses Mansfield's texts by contextualising them both within the journals where they first appeared and against the background of contemporary discourses on cinema. While exploring a single case study, Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield's Writing also discusses the intermedia exchanges in which modernism at large is rooted.

Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield's Writing

Daniela Fortezza

Vita Fortunati

strategie di rappresentazione della guerra nella cultura contemporanea

Conflitti

Adriana Corrado

Crossing borders – both physically and imaginatively – is part of our 'nomadic' postmodern identity, but transcultural and transnational exchanges have also played a major role in the centuries-long processes of hybridisation that helped to fashion the vast geographic, political and imaginative container of diversity we call Europe. This volume gathers together the work of scholars from several European countries in an attempt to encourage a collective reflection upon historical – and often 'mythical' – locations and landscapes, as well as upon the thresholds and faultlines that unite or separate them. The issues the volume tackles are delicate and complex, for the encounter of differences engenders both curiosity and suspicion and there is no easy way to create a new synthesis while respecting and promoting diversity. However, since Europe is inevitably a cultural and political entity 'in the making', Europeans should embrace the 'great narrative' of a 'utopian project', uniting their efforts to work towards a civilisation that is grounded on plurality and openness.

European Crossroads and Faultlines

Sites of Exchange

This book takes a look at the evolution of crime fiction. Considering 'criminography' as a system of inter-related sub-genres, it explores the connections between modes of literature such as revenge tragedies, the gothic and anarchist fiction, while taking into account the influence of pseudo-sciences such as mesmerism and criminal anthropology.

In an age of world citizenship, literary scholarship is focusing increasingly on texts which communicate effectively over cultural lines. Advocating a planetary approach to contemporary literature, this critical text examines eight novels from eight cultures. The writers discussed are Julian Barnes, Magda Szabo, Abraham B. Yehoshua, Ian McEwan, W.G. Sebald, Murakami Haruki, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Azar Nafisi. Focusing on the authors’ encouragement to meditate on life’s most pressing issues, the essays here invite us to reevaluate postmodernism as a current category.

Maurizio Ascari

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