The Italian Gothic and Fantastic: Encounters and Re-writings of Narrative Traditions

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.