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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 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.

In the wake of the so-called refugee crisis, the ethical imperative to write about the predicament of refugees has become hard to ignore. However, many representational pitfalls are involved in this process. Can refugees relate their story in a way that does not trap them into the role of victims? Can authors that choose to tell these stories avoid appropriating these experiences? This article tackles these issues in a comparative fashion, taking its case studies and theoretical insights from both the Italian and British cultural context, focusing on Elvira Mujčić’s Consigli per essere un bravo immigrato, Alessandro Leogrande’s La frontiera, and the short stories collections Refugee Tales., Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale

Progetti per l’Umanità. Rivoluzioni, Utopie e Ingegneria Sociale (Projects for Humankind. Revolutions, Utopias and Social Engineering) explores a variety of plans and attempts to transform human beings into something different and better. In particular, it engages with utopian thinking and its ineludible counterpart, dystopia; with moments of political, cultural or philosophical revolution aimed at triggering profound shifts in human life; and with different projects of social engineering to be accomplished through a variety of means such as education, propaganda or alterations to the human body or mind. The case studies included in this volume range from the 18th century to the present day, and involve disciplines such as literary and film studies, philosophy, political science and cultural history. In particular, the volume features essays on the following topics: mythology in German Romanticism; Martin Heidegger’s eschatology; Francesco Saverio Salfi’s essay on the 1783 earthquake in Calabria; the scapigliati writers Carlo Dossi and Giovanni Faldella; the utopian production of positivist anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza; the Proletkul’t movement; early Soviet children’s magazines; the political implications of Russian linguaculturology (lingvokul’turologija); Lafayette Ronald Hubbard’s Dianetics; Zulu intellectual and writer Herbert Dhlomo’s speculative fiction; “self-management” (autogestione) and the Italian Socialist Party in the 1970s; the current debate on surrogate motherhood; and Terry Gilliam’s dystopian film trilogy. Through these multiple perspectives, the volume argues that human projectuality is an anthropological constant throughout history that is both necessary for human existence and simultaneously fraught with dangers; and that it is therefore a crucial category to analyse reality and fiction alike., Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale