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In the history of British culture, few authors have distanced themselves from the otherising discourse that has informed its imperial master narrative. This essay tries to tackle this issue through a reading of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, i.e., through the reading of this island as an extreme place where science is implemented without conscience, as late Victorians would put it. Specifically, beside the reading of the scientific romance as a dystopian accelerated Darwinism, here a colonial reading is offered, inasmuch as Wells describes the Beast People in terms of colonized races. We start from Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, that is to say, the colony (Doctor Moreau’s island can allegorically be considered such) as an extreme place where things are «different» or where they can happen «differently». In short, in Doctor Moreau’s case, the island is a place where the wild side of the civilized man can find an outlet or safety valve that cannot be found in metropolitan centres. However, Wells’ novella is not unambiguous in his censure of the colonial pattern. The credibility of the story is marred by the fact that Prendick, the protagonist and witness of «The Moreau Horrors!», is an unreliable narrator, in so far as the editor, Prendick’s nephew, reports that his uncle’s was considered a «curious instance of the lapse of memory consequent upon physical and mental stress». In other words, the story is not only about a mad scientist but also a possibly mad narrator, who writes his tale while confessing his desire to give his «right hand to forget». Hence, the (involuntary?) mise-en-scène of what decolonial thinkers call the «forgetfullness of coloniality» (Maldonado-Torres 2014): that absolute sickness which the West suffers from, forgetting its past and present misdeeds. If the narrator is unreliable or mad, it goes without saying that Prendick, like Conrad’s Marlow a few years later, «cannot take the next step», as Said wrote (1994). As a matter of fact, notwithstanding his disapproval of the high modernist aesthetics, Wells risks falling into its trap of the self-conscious contemplative passivity, yielding to the amnesic device of neglecting a possible alternative condition for the wretched of the earth.

The essay draws a comparison between Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013). Despite the differences in biographical details and historical background, the analysis explores the meaning of liminal landscapes and their interaction with human beings. By juxtaposing Egdon Heath, the Wessex moorland where the Victorian novel is set, with the lowland in south-west Kolkata the Indian strand of Lahiri’s novel revolves around, I reflect upon the symbolic role of liminal spaces as metaphors for the crossing of local and transnational borders. These novels capture the ambiguities of places where life and death coexist, displaying a specific natural language (landguage) that only some characters are able to understand. Hardy presents Egdon Heath as a place in movement that can regulate a deep chronological time dating back to Celtic and Roman history. The heath features magic and superstition that alternate with a wide range of flora and fauna. Hardy’s depiction of nature as a site of alienation and sterility undermines the idyllic trope of the pastoral genre that the novel seems to evoke. While in The Return of the Native worries and anxieties dominate the crossing of borders, making homecoming an impossible journey, with an atavistic landscape rejecting the imperial and colonial logics of XIX century England, Lahiri, who turns to Hardy’s descriptive language of natural beauty, portrays a likewise ambiguous and controversial space that opens up to extraterritorial connections. The Bengali mudflat, residual of a land reclaimed by the English in the XVIII century, is a liminal space where aridity and humidity alternate. The Indian lowland is then a palimpsest recording postcolonial conflicts and personal loss, a chronotopic unity that transcends time and space. Lahiri extends the symbolic meaning of the layered Bengali landscape through connections to the muddy beaches of Rhode Island, along the north-eastern Atlantic coastline where the American side of the novel is set. Lahiri’s novel, in conclusion, draws upon Hardy’s tale the motif of homecoming and it reveals the performative role of liminality (Thomassen) in line with the studies on topopoetics (Tuan, Moslund, Heidegger, Glissant). A combination of human vulnerability and ecological fragility, not only Lahiri’s liminal spaces convey death and loss, they ultimately envision possibility of hybridization and contact.

This essay takes as its focus Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), seeking to explore the pervasive interrelations between psychological and geographical aspects of the plot, between literary form and Eurocentric imperialist tropes, between Modernism and British colonialism. At first sight, the narrative is in part novel of manners and in part a Bildungsroman. It tells the story of Rachel Vinrace, a young British woman at the turn of the century, taken by her father on a trading voyage to the mouth of the Amazon River. Rachel is portrayed as an immature and innocent girl who, during the voyage and under the instruction of her aunt, emerges from her sheltered background and is encouraged to imagine marriage and maternity as the destiny that will fulfill her life. However, Woolf endows her semi-autobiographical protagonist with a powerful desire to evade or transcend this culturally determined destiny; in other words, to break out of the female initiation paradigm that her culture imposes upon women, constituting them not as fully legitimated participants in history and culture but as culture’s material support. The novel traces the mythical voyage of the Euphrosyne (in which the pro-imperial Richard and Clarissa Dalloway are first introduced as characters) from London to South America and then narrates the activities in an English resort community near the imaginary village of Santa Marina. But within the traditional framework, discordant elements begin to form their own stronger and subtler patterns which evolve toward an unpredicted and startling unhappy ending: presented with women’s traditional alternatives (marriage against their will or death; falling in love and death), Rachel falls in love and dies. If the heart of Woolf’s novel is a disengagement from the authority of the paternal word and an affirmation of the semiotic regressive otherness of the maternal voice, we must consider that this voice materializes in the primordial din of the jungles of South America. Moreover, Rachel dies after contracting a strange disease during a nightmarish expedition in the jungle, in which the Other (m-other) emerges as echo, silence, cries of birds and monkeys, women natives milking babies and staring at her with a motionless hostile gaze. The decay and death that underlie tropical nature are narrated in the language of infection, contamination, degeneration and decline, typical of imperialist and modernist discourse. The very title of The Voyage Out asks to be interrogated, as it implies a deictic gesture toward a beyond, and stipulates a movement from an inside to an outside, a passage through or across boundaries. Boundaries to be traversed could include those between home and an exotic world, between interiority and exteriority, or even between the patriarchal dwelling place and some other, oppositional space. In addition, the title implies a potential voyage back, the protagonist returning grown up, transfigured and enriched. The fact that the novel denies the voyage back, indicates that the outward movement has not merely been an exotic, voyeuristic, or therapeutic sortie in pursuit of the rejuvenation of the paternal word, but a more permanent extrication from that dominant rhetoric.

Cape Farewell is an international not-for-profit programme based in the UK which brings creative talents, scientists and informers together to see global warming with their own eyes, with the aim to engage and inspire a sustainable future society and instigate a cultural response to the climate challenge. This essay analyses two artistic experiences which stemmed from the Cape Farewell project: the one of the novelist Ian McEwan and the one of the choreographer Siobhan Davies, both members of the 2005 Cape Farewell Expedition to Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard, in the Arctic Sea. While Davies’s response to her experience is a work embodying the idea of fragility of the body she had experienced in the Arctic, McEwan writes a satirical and allegorical novel about a greedy and selfish Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Davies’s artistic work took the form of a projection titled Endangered Species, in which a ballerina dances inside a museum display case, wearing a costume made of long bending rods, suggesting the dramatic uneasiness of the body in the extreme spaces of the North Pole. The key element of McEwan’s novel, on the contrary, is irony, which is used to make fun of the Cape Farewell Expedition crew, and above all to depict the anti-hero Michael Beard, who takes part to the Expedition but is actually shocked by the entire experience, insomuch as to imagine, while dreading to die from hypothermia, one of his colleagues proclaiming his obituary on TV by saying «He went to see global warming for himself». Both works focus on the vulnerability and unsuitableness of the human body in extreme conditions, aiming at highlighting that it is time for humans to understand they do not belong to such spaces. To do this, both artists use the trope of metaphor: Davies makes use of the metaphor of the «endangered animal» in a cage, out of place, while McEwan uses the metaphor of the boot room, which the crew is unable to keep tidy responsibly, concluding «How were they to save the earth […] when it was so much larger than the boot room?». Thanks to the use McEwan makes of irony, he manages to rise in the reader awareness towards two great faults of humanity: egoism and inconsistency, which are among the main causes of most environmental issues. Both artists present planet Earth as an autonomous ecosystem whose functioning does not depend on humans, but which humans must respect if they want to survive.

Set in Irish-speaking Donegal in August 1833, Translations is one of Brian Friel’s best-known plays, which has elicited extensive criticism since its premiere in 1980. Drawing on Edward Said’s studies, most scholars interpret the play as Friel’s attempt to expose the imperialist implications of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, whereby the process of mapping Donegal is precursor of a cultural programming aimed at the erasure of the Gaelic heritage. Consequently, another major branch of criticism discusses the playwright’s historical accuracy in depicting this cartographic project. In the wake of Morash and Richards’s Mapping Irish Theatre and Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, however, the present essay proposes to analyse the recalcitrant geography of Pre-famine Gaeltacht as is evoked in the play. Due to its remoteness, Donegal was a twilit region difficult to reach and one of the last bastions of Celtic culture in the eyes of the British «sappers», entrusted with charting its wilderness in the 1830s. Friel used their diaries and letters as sources to describe the encounter between two cultures – with the Gaelic one threatened with extinction – in Donegal Baile Beag, which the British characters view as a village crystallised out of time. The dramatic landscape mirrors the tensions engendered by the encounter between Irish and British peoples, who also differ in the way of knowing the landscape and relating to it; on the one hand, Gaelic lore and mythology inform the Irish peasants’ perspective: for instance, they believe that the heroes and gods of the Ulster Cycle live by their side. On the other, the British see the Irish woodlands and wetlands as spaces to anglicise and control, with maps and technology functioning as instruments of colonisation. Britain’s project is bound to succeed and its scorched-earth policy will change the physical appearance of the landscape. Importantly, the occupiers’ incursion only quickens an ongoing process of modernisation. Despite appearing as a «flight from contemporaneity», the rural Baile Beag has been already transformed by socio-economic pressures. The lands of Donegal, here represented as a precarious repository of Celtic culture where boundaries dividing reality from mythology are permeable, is becoming more and more a lieu de memoire, which will only exist in the memory and tales of its inhabitants. The familiar place is being replaced by the openness and freedom of the space: a space that poses threats or promises for its original inhabitants.

This essay takes as its starting points the notion of remediation and the linguistics of subtitling in order to advance a new reading of the audiovisual translation of Farley Mowat’s short story Walk Well, My Brother (1975), whose remediation in film The Snow Walker (2003) is a paramount example of foreignising translation aimed at protecting the ethno-cultural diversity in Canada. Not only such an Inuit film with subtitles as The Snow Walker envisions the clash between Canadian and Inuit cultures but is also a survival tale in the far North examining the relationship between technology and minority cultures. I track through these references and look at the issues – the role of subtitling in the preservation of cultural specificity, subtitling strategies for rendering culture-bound terms, cohesion and coherence in subtitling, segmentation, etc. – which they raise. But my central purpose is to re-read the aforementioned subtitled film by applying the linguistics of subtitling and its text-reduction shifts. I analyse the problems of rendering intra-linguistic and extra-linguistic cultural elements from one language and cultural into another in order to demonstrate the challenge of rendering hybrid forms or multilingualism. Through The Snow Walker, I suggest, subtitling may be considered as an extreme form of foreignisation, a modality which is able to conceptualise cultural diversity thereby avoiding ethnocentric violence.

Il volume offre uno sguardo sulla raffigurazione degli spazi estremi nella letteratura in lingua inglese. Nel mondo anglofono, soprattutto in relazione alla sua storia coloniale e postcoloniale, i luoghi «alla fine del mondo» permettono di definire e di ridefinire i rapporti fra il sé e l’altro, fra il centro e le periferie. Gli «estremi confini» fanno leva sul ventaglio delle possibilità offerte dal remoto, dallo sconosciuto, dal diverso; i luoghi «dove tutto può accadere», su cui si sono proiettate fantasie utopiche e inquietudini distopiche, costituiscono un motore narrativo dalle caratteristiche sorprendenti, che viaggia lungo i binari sia del realismo che del fantastico. Saggi di: Elisa Bolchi, Nicoletta Brazzelli, Luigi Cazzato, Lucio De Capitani, Francesca Guidotti, Angelo Monaco, Francesca Montesperelli, Elena Ogliari, Eleonora Sasso.

In February 1845 Sir John Franklin was given the command of a naval expedition to find a Northwest Passage in Canada and he set sail on the Erebus, with a three-year supply of provisions: when, in 1848, the expedition had not returned, Lady Jane Franklin was personally involved in the organization of several search parties. Although she never participated in any of these, she took charge of their preparation and scheduling. Finally, in 1857 she sent the Fox on a final search for survivors: three years later, Francis Leopold McClintock returned with evidence of the expedition’s unhappy fate. In this essay, the tragic loss of Sir John Franklin’s expedition in search of the Northwest Passage is investigated from the perspective of Franklin’s wife, who won significant popular celebrity through her efforts to discover the fate of her beloved husband. Jane Franklin greatly transformed the narrative discourse of Arctic exploration, both through the direct influence she exerted on the search for Franklin and through her rewriting of the language of heroism, suffering and national honour. Her correspondence with British prime ministers, Members of Parliament, Lords of the Admiralty offers a private side to a national tragedy and sheds new light on what Sir John Franklin’s disappearance meant to England and its public opinion. The analysis of Lady Franklin’s letters focuses on the combination of the (female) language of affection to promote (male) imperial views. These letters persuaded the Admiralty to persevere with the search when it would have given up, and kept Franklin’s memory and honour alive in the national imagination. The sequence of Jane’s letters also traces the progression of Lady Franklin’s growing awareness of her husband’s death and contributes to the transformation of the Arctic explorer into a heroic figure. The language of Lady Franklin’s letters is geographically precise and conveys detailed information on the Arctic, whilst also providing readers with the domestic side of the disaster. She is the «afflicted wife» whose emotional language reveals the affection she feels for her husband, while her letters are addressed to officials. In her writings, two voices overlap: the Arctic expert and the wife. Jane called upon the Admiralty to perform its function and rescue her husband, alluding to the Arctic as a blank space on the maps, thus employing male colonial language. But she also represents the search as an emotional and moral imperative. These two discourses are distinct in style and rhetoric. The Arctic analysis is clear and discusses the reports of returned navigators, the shipping routes; however, the real power of Lady Franklin’s texts lies in her emotional appeals. She also apologizes for her «female motions»: in this sense, the introductory and concluding remarks of her letters are worth considering. She was afraid that her advocacy would necessarily be weakened because of her too close connection with the subject. From her offer of a reward to whalers, to her identification as the widow of Franklin, she made her letters persuasive to both the officials and the general public, challenging the male world of Arctic navigation and enhancing the moral responsibility of Britain towards its heroes and wives’ devotion.

Vermilion Sands (1971), the title J.G. Ballard ascribed to one of his collections of short stories, stands out as a powerful visual marker for its equally vivid setting: an extreme environment where inner and outer space merge, and where deranged dreams and alluring nightmares may eventually come true. The imaginary place named Vermilion Sands is a once popular seaside resort now turned, as its name suggests, into a gloomy, red-shaded desert, peopled by eccentric aristocrats and lethargic artists, by mysteriously charming women and seductively spellbound men with their trail of private illusions, unspeakable secrets and unfathomable obsessions. Often seen as a specimen of quintessential Ballard’s science fiction, the book has been read as a critical reworking of conventional formulas: the barren Martian soil paradoxically relocated to Earth, to an unspecified part of the American continent as the only possible home of utopian thinking, Ballard himself having warned that «the only truly alien planet is Earth». And while it certainly pays tribute to the modes of Surrealism and Modernism, Vermilion Sands may rightly be seen as representative of its author’s aesthetic choices and stylistic solutions. The one crucial feature that seems to have eluded the attention of critics so far, however, is the notion of «extremity» itself, which I would take as an invaluable hermeneutical tool for analysing the competing claims of space and subjectivity in the stories. Ballard’s writings have often been described as «visual fiction», that is to say as stories told in and through pictures, where landscape provides much more than mere aesthetic background and becomes psychologically relevant as it serves to externalize otherwise elusive, and often dangerously unsettled, individual identities. The experience of extreme spaces always leads characters to tackle personal boundaries, both on the physical and on the psychical level. Encounter thus takes place at the precarious junction between an unstable self and its uncertainly defined surroundings, each being in a way shaped by the other. In many respects, extreme environments are the epitome of solitude, a common human plight ever since the existential crisis of modernity: they convey contradictory drives, and express at the same time euphoric and dysphoric attitudes, Eros and Thanatos, inadmissible desires and irrepressible fears. The waterless shore of Vermilion Sands, symptomatically suspended in time, is in fact the place where long-repressed memories of trauma and ambivalent feelings eventually resurface, and thwart all efforts to suppress the instinct-driven sea of primeval unconscious. Landscape is a key to understanding mind, and vice versa; ultimately, both are conjured up as extreme spaces inviting an exploration, a voyage, a reading: in other words, a visually intense and truly transformative experience.

In this contribution I compare three texts by Robert Louis Stevenson – the short story The Merry Men, the essay Memoirs of an Islet, and a central chapter of the novel Kidnapped. All of them feature the tidal islet of Earraid, which Stevenson visited while touring the Scottish coast as an engineer in training. Using insights provided by the later essay Records of a Family of Engineers, I read Earraid as the symbol of a coherent frontier narrative that Stevenson creates out of the engineering legacy of his father, uncles and grandfather, who were all successful family of lighthouse builders in Scotland throughout the 19th century. This narrative, which employs both the peculiar spatial imagination of the frontier as well as its (multiple) ideological connotations, frames nature as hostile, to be pacified through technical progress. Moreover, it opposes two archetypal figures: the engineer-pioneer, an inventor and adventurer who brings light and progress to the wilderness of the Scottish sea, and the wrecker, a scavenger who lives off the salvaged goods of the shipwrecks, refuses to help the victims of the sea and is therefore the natural enemy of the engineer. The moral and material clash between these two figures, as well as the idea of progress as a gradual pacification of nature that emerges from this mythology, is variously articulated and re-elaborated within the three texts. The Merry Men, a tale of madness and shipwrecks, explores the ethical worldviews connected to the engineer and the wrecker through the two main characters, Charles and Gordon, whose fate is decided by their respective relationship with the savage seascape of Aros (Earraid). If this seascape follows the imaginative and geographical patterns of a frontier that still needs to be understood and tamed, Memoirs of an Islet, an autobiographical essay concerning Stevenson’s stay on Earraid, represents the conquest of that frontier, documenting the successful construction of a lighthouse on the islet and juxtaposing it with Stevenson’s own reflections on his own life and career. The chapter of Kidnapped set on Earraid, instead, hints at Stevenson’s attempt to undermine his own mythology, suggesting that each narrative focused on an extreme place, including the frontier of the Scottish coast, is culturally located and ultimately contestable. David Balfour’s shipwreck on Earraid seems initially to follow the patterns established by the other texts, but those patterns are ultimately subverted when Stevenson provides us with a glimpse on a very different perspective on both the natural world and the local population of this environment.