About the Editors:
Francesca Billiani (BA Trieste, PhD Reading) is a Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Manchester, where she is also a member of the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies.

Gigliola Sulis (BA Cagliari, PhD Reading), is a Lecturer in Italian Literature at the University of Leeds.

This volume investigates modes of the reception, rewriting, and appropriation of the gothic and the fantastic in Italy in the late nineteenth century and the second half of the twentieth century. It articulates the ways in which Italian writers both undermined the narrative spaces created by realist narration and introduced a gnoseological dimension centered on a disempowered and disjointed subjectivity. It argues that both in their breaking of nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic and literary paradigms and in their radical questioning of personal, collective, ideological, and literary identities, the gothic and the fantastic become forces of subversion. The identity resulting from this hermeneutic engagement is defined not by coincidence, but by difference: both collective and subjective identities must activate a process of negotiation that has to assimilate the Other in the spaces between the real and the unreal. Meanwhile, by assimilating the Other into our own modes of representation of reality and imagination, twentieth century female writers of the fantastic show how alternative identities can be shaped and social constituencies can be challenged.

The FDU Press has particular strengths in literary studies, world history and politics, biography, film, ethnic studies, sociology, the Civil War, art, religion, local history, and urban studies.