This volume offers a varied and well-structured overview of the Italian Gothic and the fantastic in the late nineteenth century and the second half of the twentieth century. These were key moments in the history of the Italian Gothic and fantastic as they saw the reception, rewriting, and appropriation of foreign models of these genres by Italian authors. The contributions are preceded by Francesca Billiani's cohesive introduction, which contextualizes each essay within the collection and fits it into the wider debate on the fantastic.
The well-defined structure of the volume and the logical organization of the interventions allow the reader to follow argumentation easily. The first part of the book, which includes Remo Cesarani's and Monica Farnetti's essays, lays the theoretical and critical foundations for the subsequent discussions by the different contributors. Besides addressing the difficulty of defining the term 'fantastic' and trying to explain its late rise in Italy, Cesarani stresses the presence of the fantastic as a mode in other literary genres. Farnetti focuses on the appropriation of the fantastic by women writers and describes the nature of the female fantastic in relation to Freud's 'The Uncanny.' The response of women to the Other, the strange, the unfamiliar, she argues, is empathetic and characterized by an attitude of openness, compassion, even affection and identification rather than anxiety or discomfort.
The second part of the volume contains four contributions illustrating the employment of Gothic elements in the writings of nineteenth-century authors. Vittorio Roda deals with the theme of teh fragmentation of the body and analyses the functional (instead of physical) separation of a part of the body in works by Tarchetti, Pirandello, and Svevo. Roda gives an overview of changes in the treatment of this subject which occurred between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries with the advent of psychoanalytical thought. Angelo Mangini explores Capuana'a and Verga's reflections on the act of writing and its relation to the occult, examining Capuana's parallel between the artist and the medium and Verga's definition of his work as fantasmagoria. Ann Caesar looks at the Gothic elements and structures in Fogazzaro's Malombra, drawing comparisons with English Victorian novels and highlighting the innovations brought about by the Italian author. Her discussion of Fogazzaro is interwoven with the analysis of the rise of the novel and of a new, wider readership. Finally, Ursula Fanning's essay outlines the evolution of Matilde Serao's Gothic from what Fanning calls 'domestic gothic' to the fully Gothic novels, illustrating the influence of other Gothic European women writers on Serao.
The third part of the volume is devoted to the exploration of the works of women writers who chose the Gothic and the fantastic genre with a view to challenging and subverting patriarchic society and male-authored literature. Sharon Wood's contribution illustrates Ortese's use of the fantastic as a form of protest against capitalistic bourgeois society and shows Ortese's rejection of the Enlightenment and philosophical naturalism. Daniela La Penna examines several aspects of Ortese's L'iguana, including the hybrid nature of the novel in terms of genre, its intertextual dimension, and its postcolonial discourse. She uses the novel as a starting-point in a penetrating analysis of the subversive nature of the fantastic and its relation to the rise of the Other. Danielle Hipkins illustrates how, in Serenata, Rossana Ombres employs the fantastic both to fathom women's relationships with the male-authored literary canon and to voice female anxiety in the rapport with a male-dominated literature. Rita Wilson closes the volume with an analysis of Paola Capriolo's appropriation and rewriting of myth and of its relation to the fantastic, exploring the image of the mirror and reflection.
The editors' work is to be commended for the valuable and precise bibliographical apparatus. The volume, which succeeds in presenting the Gothic and the fantastic as literature of subversion, is a sophisticated, yet accessible, ensemble of essays which bring fresh, and stimulating ideas to the debate around the fantastic, leading it to a new and challenging territory.
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