Introduction: Claudio Magris – A Portrait of the Writer as a European Citizen.

The Quest for Europe With attention to the multiple identitarian and cultural foci in Claudio Magris's oeuvre, the seven essays included in this Special Issue explore the complexities of the European idea in and through Magris's works and poetics. - Claudio Magris, "Identità ovvero incertezza" (2005) As one of the foremost European writers and intellectuals of our time, Claudio Magris has consistently kept Europe at the center of his vision. Notes 1 For an analysis of transitionality and contingency as agents of mobility and change in Magris's oeuvre, see Pireddu, I Works of Claudio Magris. i 2 With these two adjectives, "real and improbable", Magris qualifies the lives of the three peculiar characters in I Croce del sud i , as in the subtitle, I Tre vite vere e improbabili i . 3 All translations from the Italian are the author's unless indicated otherwise. She illustrates how various ideas underlying Magris's own formulation of Europe were already part of a discourse on national and cultural identity starting with the establishment of the newspaper I La Favilla i , and continued in the works of that great generation of Triestine writers, as Magris defined them, which included, among others, Scipio Slataper and Giani Stuparich. [Extracted from the article]