This thesis examines how literal and figurative disappearance can be said to have occurred through certain technological developments after World War II. This study investigates key concepts of the human condition alongside notions of disappearance, underpinned by the contextual framework of Primo Levi’s pivotal question and statement: ‘if this is a Man’. As a survivor of Auschwitz, Levi reflected on threats to the human through Holocaust testimony in If This is a Man (1947) and through his science fiction (sf) which explored technological perils after 1945. Like Levi, my work focuses on the ways in which ‘Man’ can be challenged and undermined. While my work uses a similar approach, it goes further by applying ideas of disappearance and by exploring technologies outside Levi’s remit and within US sf. To look at the concept of human replacement and destruction, I build on the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard who argued that humanity is at risk of figuratively ‘disappearing’ through a blurring of boundaries between the real and the artificial. Baudrillard speaks of losing traditional concepts of the human condition through simulacra and technological dominance. I combine Baudrillard’s idea of disappearance with Levi’s concerns over technological threats to the human. In this thesis, I speak of literal disappearance as involving death (especially to the collective through genocide or extinction) and figurative disappearance through an alteration of the traditional concept of what it means to be human. Through representative sf texts, I explore how many writers have portrayed the human as under pressure through certain technological advancements especially after World War II. My thesis is arranged thematically, tracing three key technological epochs within a chronological structure. The themes for the three parts are intended to highlight some key concerns emerging from sf which relate to the human condition and disappearance, such as the threat of the nuclear, the emergence of cybernetics, and the development of artificial intelligence. I use these historic events to reflect on how US sf explores technological apocalyptic themes.

I became interested in the work of Antonio Dal Masetto through reading his weekly column in the Argentine newspaper Pdgina/12 when I lived in Buenos Aires for a period in 2002. These were short observational pieces about characters and situations in the city with a narrative perspective which seemed to denote an 'outsider'. As an outsider myself, I found this voice inclusive and intriguing and also sometimes very funny. It struck me that the perceptions in this column were more profound than material I might have expected to appear in a daily broadsheet newspaper. The style of the writing appealed to me this cool observational tone, a gentle humour, a simple prose and a certain implicit quality which reminded me of poetry. This was my initial subjective response.

My thesis is an in-depth analysis of the writings of three Italian migrant writers. Specifically, I discuss several of the different forms taken by orality and explore the relationship between orality and literacy, by analysing the work of three important figures: Kossi Komla Ebri (from Togo), Tahar Lamri (from Algeria) and Yousif Jaralla (from Iraq). I have chosen to concentrate on them because of the originality of their works which possess distinctive literary qualities. My aim is to establish a new formal and aesthetic approach to "migrant writers", in order to: 1) enhance the current literary and critical debate (mostly influenced, in Italy, by thematic and sociological concerns); 2) question the Italian literary canon, which should definitely include "migrant writers" for the literary and aesthetic quality of their works. From a theoretical viewpoint my analysis has taken as its starting points, the idea of oral-literary continuum and Derrida's views on oralite vs. ecriture to challenge the perception of orality (and "oralitura") as an inferior and unsophisticated form of storytelling. This is a perception which is often shared by the authors I discuss and by their critics. I challenge this perception by revealing the literary sophistication of these works through an analysis of the formal patterns they exhibit. This clearly emerges especially in my analysis of the work of Iraqi storyteller Yousif Jaralla, on whose work there are very few in-depth studies. In my chapter on Jaralla I have focussed my account on two aspects of his work: his conception of himself as a storyteller who delivers oral narratives and the stylistic elements which he employs to give a musical rhythm to his tales. iv

Due to its elaborate woodcuts and artificial language, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499, hereafter ‘HP’) has traditionally been presented as a fringe anomaly within the histories of the book and of Italian philology. Other studies have examined the influence of the HP in art and literature, but there has been little study of the role of readers in mediating that influence. This framing of the HP as unreadable visual marvel has impeded consideration of Aldus’ creation as a used text within the wider fabric of humanism. Liane Lefaivre’s conceptualisation of the HP as a creative dream-space for idea generation was a significant step towards foregrounding the text’s readers. This thesis set to testing this hypothesis against the experiences of actual readers as recorded in their marginalia. A world census of annotated copies of the HP located a number of examples of prolific annotation, showing readers making use of the HP for a variety of purposes. Benedetto and Paolo Giovio applied a Plinian model of extractive reading to two copies at Como and Modena, reading the HP in a manner analogous to the Natural History. Ben Jonson read his copy of the 1545 HP as a source for visual elements of stage design. An anonymous second hand in Jonson’s copy read the text as an alchemical allegory, as did the hands in a copy at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. Pope Alexander VII (Fabio Chigi) combed the text for examples of verbal wit, or acutezze, while comparing Poliphilo’s journeys through an architectural dream with his own passages through Rome. Informed by analogy with modern educational media, I have reframed the HP as a ‘humanistic activity book’, in which readers cultivated their faculty of ingegno through ludic engagement with the text.

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This thesis reviews Roberto Calasso’s Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia (1988) and demonstrates that thematic and formal elements of this text allow us to to cast a postmodern and poststructuralist light on his theorization of ‘absolute literature’ – a declaration of faith in the power of literature which may appear to clash with the late twentieth century postmodern and poststructuralist climate responsible for concepts such as la mort de l’auteur. The importance of these findings lies in their going against Calasso’s claim that he never needed to use the word ‘postmodern’ and his complete silence on contemporary literary criticism, as well as on most contemporary authors. Calasso’s self-representation (interviews, criticism and the themes of the part-fictional work-in-progress) acknowledges as influences ancient Greek authors, both canonical and marginal; French décadence; the finis Austriae; Marxism; Nietzsche; Hindu mythology and Aby Warburg. These influences are certainly at work in Le nozze, however they may be employed to subvert Calasso’s self-presentation. I have explored in detail the representations of literature emerging from Le nozze, and shown that they allow the identification in Calasso’s texts of elements confirming his fascination with poststructuralism, in particular with the thought of Jacques Derrida, despite the complete silence on this philosopher throughout Calasso’s work.

This thesis traces the relationship between ‘recounting History’ and ‘re-counting Fiction’ through the analysis of the Croniche di Lucca and the Novelle by Giovanni Sercambi of Lucca (1345-1424). With the rise of literacy, vernacu-lar chronicles and collections of short-stories became increasingly popular among non-literati people, who had not received a formal education and could not read Latin, and consequently showed a marked preference for the fruition of stories in their native tongue. Scholars have already addressed a number of peculiarities that characterize the two works in question. In this thesis the point of view of Sercambi as author, as well as that of his contemporary audience, will be put under the lens. The key argument of the thesis is that Sercambi used the genre of the short story with the intent of shrouding historical facts with a veil of fictional narrative. He was aware that the choice of story-telling represented an alternative and effective vehicle for the transmission of political messages to those Lucchese citizens who read and listened to his stories being read out at Paolo Guinigi’s court. In his short stories Sercambi used the names and circumstances of real Lucchese people for the characterization of a number of personages. Through the examination of untapped archival sources that cast considerable light on Sercambi’s highly personalized approach to narrative, the thesis represents a first attempt to highlight Sercambi’s original contribution to the tradition of the Italian short story. It emerges from this research that Sercambi appears to have achieved a virtuous compromise by being able to mention Paolo Guinigi’s shortcomings as a ruler of Lucca, while at the same time exploring an alternative mode of writing about Lucca’s political and moral decay.

My Ph.D. thesis La poetica e la ricezione internazionale di Antonio Fogazzaro focuses on the literary work of Antonio Fogazzaro (1842-1911), with a particular emphasis on the influence of the clash between science and spirituality, emerging from the European debates around Naturalism and Decadentism, on his poetics. In my research project I explored this influence in relation to still understudied correspondences held in the Bertoliana Library of Vicenza. They include a great number of letters between Fogazzaro and journalists, intellectuals, translators as well as Italian and foreign editors, which attest to the parallel growth of his artistic maturity and his fame. Among the most significant Fogazzaro’s Italian correspondents figure Edmondo De Amicis, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Luigi Capuana, Arturo Graf and Guido Mazzoni. Among the foreign correspondents figure: the Francophone Ferdinand Brunietière, Georges Hérelle, André M. Gladès, Robert Leger, Édouard Rod, and the editors Hachette, Calmann-Lévy…; the Anglo-American George Tyrrell, G. Haven Putnam, William Roscoe Thayer and Theodore Roosevelt. These letters conserved in the three Funds Rumor, Roi and Nardi, reveal the relationships Fogazzaro weaved over some decades, especially at the beginning of the 20th century and the following years with an entrepreneurial spirit. These relationships could barely be defined as marginal, as they connected him with a wider cultural community within and beyond the boundaries of Italy. Not only my study aimed to review from a different angle the evolution of Antonio Fogazzaro as an author, but also to study the reception of his literary works abroad and in particular in England, United States and France. My thesis is a critical edition of these correspondences preceded by a hermeneutical investigation of Fogazzaro’s poetics and international reception, taking into account the aesthetic, thematic and linguistic features of his novels, both in their original and translated versions.

The thesis explores the hypothesis that some plots might rely on spatiality as an organising principle that impacts on the narrative structure and, consequently, on the strategies adopted by readers to understand them. In order to lay the grounding for a spatially-oriented approach to narrative understanding, this study pursues both a theoretical line of inquiry and an applied line of inquiry in literary criticism. A cognitive stance on the nature of thought as non-propositional (Johnson-Laird 1983) and of the mind as embodied (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Varela et al. 1993) provides the theoretical point of departure for the subsequent identification of a range of principles and frameworks that can be implemented to support a spatially-oriented interpretation according to the specificities of narratives. The three case studies provided by Alessandro Baricco’s City, Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano crime series, and Italo Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore illustrate how a spatially-oriented perspective can add new interpretive angles and an unprecedented insight into the ways narratives achieve a coherent structure. At the same time, the case studies serve to extrapolate a set of features that constitute the preliminary criteria for assessing whether it would be fruitful to apply a spatially-oriented approach to a specific narrative. Baricco’s, Camilleri’s and Calvino’s works represent three plot types in which spatiality impinges in three different ways on the narrative, which, as I will show, can be epitomised by the image schemata of map, trajectory, and fractal. Far from simply referring to objects which plot is compared to, these images indicate procedural techniques and strategies of sense-making that a certain type of narrative is designed to prompt in the reader through textual cues. The study, in fact, builds on and advances a notion of plot to be analysed as a process rather than a given structure, something that readers understand as they read, and not retrospectively only.

This thesis examines the depiction of Fascism together with manifestations of dissent and anti-Fascism in the twentieth century Italian novel. The first chapter considers literary prefigurations of Fascism from 1890 onwards, including the treatment of the Superuomo by D'Annunzio, Papini, Marinetti and Soffici, and also the vulgarization of the Superuomo myth in Sarfatti's 'Dux', one of Mussolini's official biographies. Also mentioned are several accounts of the First World War which reveals social dissatisfactions that proved fertile soil for Fascist exploitation. The second chapter concentrates on a number of Fascist and pro-Fascist novels, that is novels written in homage to the regime and the bestsellers whose conservative values, and preoccupations with the nuclear family, coincide with the Fascist regime's domestic policies. The third chapter examines the covert expressions of disenchantment and dissent formulated against the regime; from the antipathy of Palazzeschi and Gadda to Moravia's dissection of middle-class vacuousness, and to the concern for the conditions of the peasants, the emergence of Neorealism and the importance of the influence of the American novel for disenchanted novelists. The fourth chapter compares and contrasts the works of Si lone and Ferrero, two novelists writing in exile, who denounced the injustices and hypocrisies of the regime's domestic policies in order to undermine its international prestige. The fifth chapter analyses the retrospective portrayal of Fascism from 1943-1960, and the ideology of regeneration that developed as a reaction against the cynicism and inhumanity of the regime. The fictional treatment of the Resistance movement and various war journals are also discussed, together with the hostility of reactionary writers towards post-war Italy. A short conclusion outlines some peripheral but relevant considerations, and suggests the difficulties of attempting an accurate assessment of the degree of influence exerted on the novel by Fascism.