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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.

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.

This article adopts a transmodern approach to Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and it contends that Roy’s fusion of anti-global activism, typical of her non-fiction writings, and literary imagination, reminiscent of Indian epic texts, can provide an interesting instance of a transmodern intellectual perspective. In particular, by examining gender troubles, ethnic conflicts and vulnerable ecology, my article argues that Roy’s second novel refracts the decolonial/postcolonial debate by means of a hybrid narrative form. This interplay between creative writing and intellectual activism can be said to chime with transmodern ethics in that it promotes attentiveness to the perspective of the most marginalised., Anglistica AION: An Intersciplinary Journal, Vol 23 No 2 (2019): Pre-Fixing the Colonial: Theory and Practice

William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) depicts, in contemporary Bildungsroman fashion, the life and quest for self-identity of the eponymous heroine. The third and last volume of Trevor’s Big House trilogy, including Fools of Fortune (1983) and The Silence in the Garden (1988), The Story of Lucy Gault is set in Trevor’s native Ireland, specifically in Lahardane, a mansion along the coast of County Cork. Irish history impacts adversely on Lucy’s story, as readers follow the heroine from her childhood years during the Troubles in the 1920s to World War II and Ireland’s economic miracle at the dawn of the second millennium. As usual in Trevor’s fiction, The Story of Lucy Gault can be read as a trauma story where individual and collective grief experiences are intertwined. The only child of a Protestant family, Lucy refuses to leave Lahardane in the aftermath of a failed arson attack by three Catholics from the local village. Trevor’s heroine resigns herself to a sort of self- imposed exile from the world. Lahardane, which works as a symbolic site of colonial heritage and religious conflicts, becomes a healing and contemplative place for Lucy. Here, while reading Victorian novels, keeping bees and gardening, the heroine espouses her wounds which turn out to be “paradoxically productive” (Butler 2003). The victim of familial and historical forces she is unable to control, Lucy embraces loss as a position of strength rather than weakness. Like a modern Saint Cecilia, whose martyrdom is metaphorically associated with the heroine’s suffering, Lucy reconciles with one of the arsonists, who has eventually been interned at a mental asylum. Moving from these claims, my paper aims to address Lucy’s painful coming-of-age as trauma and selfbegetting fiction. Following the recent critical debate on the nature of the Bildungsroman (Esty 2012; Golban 2018; Graham 2019), I will first argue that Trevor exploits the conventions of the genre to illuminate the mystery of human mind, juxtaposing realism with other non-realist genres such as the gothic and the elegiac. Then, I will discuss the influence that trauma exercises on the growth of the protagonist. Lucy’s self-quest is conveyed through silences, secrets and temporal disarray, thus showcasing the unspeakable nature of trauma. Unlike the physical journey undertaken by the male protagonists of the classical Bildungsroman, Lucy’s psychological quest is instead predicated upon suffering and contemplation. Finally, I will examine how the wounded heroine’s exile from the world can be read as a deliberate declaration of autonomy. As in a self-begetting novel (Kellman 1980), Lucy’s story begets both a self and itself. Self-reflexivity and retrospectivity are at the core of Trevor’s Bildungsroman, thereby lending a self-begetting quality since the heroine is both the object of the narrative and the producer. In The Story of Lucy Gault, exposure to vulnerability may be then seen in terms of dispossession (Butler and Athanasiou), thus promoting an ethical openness to the self and the other.

Un approccio incrociato d’indagine iconografica a iconologica dei soggetti raffigurati sui portelloni di finestra nella galleria di Enea, rivela l’uso combinatorio di fonti che, da un lato, conferma l’accorta erudizione della committenza, dall’altro consente di elevarne la funzione dall’ambito della mera decorazione a quello dell’allegoria. Supportati dall’Iconologia di Cesare Ripa, dalle Georgiche di Virgilio, da fonti numismatiche antiquarie, tali soggetti contribuiscono a collocare il mito di Enea nell’ordine cosmico naturale del creato e nella Storia, e la galleria ai vertici del concettismo barocco. A combined iconographical and iconological approach on the images painted on the window shutters in the Galleria di Enea in palazzo Buonaccorsi, Macerata, provides new insights on the cultural skills of the patronage. On the one hand, it reveals the combined use of several sourches, on the other hand , gives the paintings an allegorical meaning. The allegories of the twelve months, based on the Iconologia by Cesare Ripa, contribute to mark the Gallery as one of the most interesting episode of the mature Baroque in Italy., IL CAPITALE CULTURALE. Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage, Supplementi (8/2018): La Galleria dell'Eneide di palazzo Buonaccorsi a Macerata. Nuove letture e prospettive di ricerca per il Settecento europeo / The Gallery of Palazzo Buonaccorsi in Macerata: new interpretations and research perspectives for the European Eighteenth Century