As humans re-negotiate their boundaries with the nonhuman world of animals,
inanimate entities and technological artefacts, new identities are formed and a
new epistemological and ethical approach to reality is needed. Through twelve
thought-provoking, scholarly essays, this volume analyzes works by a range of
modern and contemporary Italian authors, from Giacomo Leopardi to Elena
Ferrante, who have captured the shift from anthropocentrism and postmodernism
to posthumanism. Indeed, this is the first academic volume investigating narrative
configurations of posthuman identity in Italian literature and film.

Enrica Maria Ferrara is Assistant Professor of Italian at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of Calvino e il teatro (2011), Il realismo teatrale nella narrativa del Novecento: Vittorini, Pasolini, Calvino (2014), and co-editor of Staged Narratives / Narrative Stages: Essays in Italian Prose Narrative and Theatre (2017).   

Introduction.- PART I: WRITING IDENTITIES IN THE PRE-POSTHUMAN AND POSTHUMAN ERAS.- Giacomo Leopardi's book of the future: the Zibaldone as an encyclopaedia for the Post-Human; Gianna Conrad.- Animals, trees, and stones: The posthumanist gaze in Italian modernist fiction; Alberto Godioli, Bart van den Bossche, & Carmen van den Bergh.- Svevo's "Argo e il suo padrone": animalized human or humanized animal?; Alessio Aletta.- Identity and Anonymity in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels; Enrica Maria Ferrara.- Visions of the Future in Laura Pugno's novels "Sirene" and "La caccia"; Marco Amici.- PART II: TECHNOLOGY AND IDENTITY.- Contemporary Poetry in Italy:  A World model in the Age of Digital Reproduction; Giancarlo Alfano.- Cell phones and the Fragmented Subject in Italian Fiction; Kristina Varade.- Mechanized Women and Sentient Machines: Language, Gendered Technology and the Female Body in Luciano Bianciardi and Tiziano Scarpal; Eleonora Lima.- (Technologically) Fallen from Grace: Abjection and Android Motherhood in Viola Di Grado's Novel Bambini di ferro (2016); Serena Todesco and Annalisa Somma.- PART III: BOUNDARIES OF THE HUMAN.- The Anxiety of Proximity: Cognition, Ethics and Subjectivity at the Limits of the Human in Le cose fondamentali by Tiziano Scarpa and La vita oscena by Aldo Nove; Eugenio Bolongaro.- 'Il desiderio / di zombi proletari': the Undead and Social Conflict in the 1980s; Fabio Camilletti.- "Able to put the reader in a new relationship with reality": Posthuman impegno and/in Italian science fiction"; Giulia Iannuzzi.- New Materialism, Female Bodies and Ethics in Michelangelo Antonioni's La notte and L'eclisse; Paolo Saporito.- "Lose Your Self: Gianni Celati and the Art of Being One with the World"; Enrico Vettore.