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 ofthe 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.

Edited by Francesca Billiani and Gigliola Sulis