2020 / 25 Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere

Influenced by Walter Scott’s historical novels, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck: A Romance (eventually released in 1830) has long been overlooked by most critics and scholars. Indeed, up until recently, little attention has been paid to Mary Shelley’s attempt to delve into British history, widely perceived as both an escapist retreat into the past, and an open disavowal of her commitment to social and political reform which, on the other hand, was evident in her previous literary endeavours. Nonetheless, as this essay sets out to elucidate, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, a narrative focused on the pretender to the English throne who claimed to be Richard of Shrewsbury (one of the two “Princes in the Tower”), may be perceived as Mary Shelley’s attempt to actively employ history as an effective instrument to reflect and ponder on current-day problems. After all, in his essay entitled Of History and Romance (1797), William Godwin had already emphasized that the attentive study of history could offer valuable insights into the future. Hence, it could be argued that, far from signaling Mary Shelley’s lack of engagement, her fourth novel actually aimed at delving into highly debated issues, such as tyranny, power and, as will be shown, even the role of women in society.

In 1848, the publication of Arthur Hugh Clough’s The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich. A Long Vacation-Pastoral astounds the Victorian reading public. This complex narrative poem, characterised by heteroglossia, an idiosyncratic metre and a variety of styles and registers, at different levels deconstructs Englishness, as well as it relocates the concept of Britishness. The article aims to show how the poet, both through form and content, provocatively suggests that, behind its façade of stability, Victorian Britain is not a supranational state marked by political uniformity and cultural organicity but rather consists of several “nations within the nation” that cannot be harmonized, owing to language, gender, class and ethnic questions. First, Clough conveys this image of a dis-United Kingdom through his deployment of a heterogeneous amalgam of diversified languages, reflecting individual, cultural, social or geographical differences. Secondly, he debunks a unified idea of Englishness (or Britishness for that matter) by depicting a confused English hero whose emotional fluctuations mirror the fractures undermining the stability and unity of Victorian society: the gender divide; class conflicts; and the clash between rural and urban worlds. Finally, by representing a group of Oxford students’ journey to the exotic Scottish Highlands, Clough invites the reader to reflect on Britain’s ethnic and cultural divisions, on the meaning of cultural reception and the hindrances involved in any experience of trans- or interculturality. Ultimately, the analysis of these three interrelated aspects will explain why Clough’s contentious conceptions of Englishness and Britishness must be seen in the light of his sceptical frame of mind and epistemic (self)doubt.

Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation has been a controversial narrative since it appeared in 2002. As the subtitle of the book emphasizes, it is ‘an imitation’ of Oscar Wilde’s well-known myth-making The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890 and 1891. Is Will Self’s piece of fiction a fulfilment of Wilde’s? How does the author trace and rewrite the Irish genius’s classic? How does the text retrieve and transform the cultural and the sexual politics of the model on which it is based? This paper aims at briefly answering these questions, dealing with the way(s) in which Dorian mirrors The Picture of Dorian Gray from a contemporary neo-Victorian perspective which, at the same time, like many present-day narratives in the English language, tries to recover the late Victorian past, establishing significant relationships between the nineteenth-century fin de siècle and our own epoch. Both Self and Wilde are haunted by the Narcissus myth, narcissism, the Doppelganger motif and, ultimately, mirror images. Mirrors trace the multiple reflections of selves, a theme that is recurrent and almost obsessive in both books, which are the product of the inner and outer conflicts of their respective ages. Both of them mirror a period of decadence and excess, of consumerism, of social and political crisis, of sexual ambiguities and reinventions, of projections of disease, of disenchantment and escapism, of psychological insecurity. Taking this into consideration, I will try to analyze the parallelisms between Self’s and Wilde’s texts, paying special attention to their complementary portrayal of cultural, aesthetic and sexual mores, and postulating that neo-Victorianism is very much alive in our present time. Regrettably, the triad syphilis-AIDS- COVID-19 epidemics can also provide a suitable coda in this respect.

In the past twenty years, French literature lived on credit: on the credit of the last century. Now at the heart of a crisis of trust in public speech and in democracy (still undergoing a state of emergency), it has decreased in fiduciary value. This article pleads though for a new strength and a new authority for the French novel: a strength and an authority that are related to what I call epimodernism. Epimodernism denotes a kind of “post-postmodernism”. It replaces the double post by six different values of the Ancient Greek prefix epi: surface contact, origin, extension, duration, authority, and finality. Epimodernism thus sets up six different relations to the heritage of modernist utopias, re-orienting postmodern critique and rebooting, with all due irony, its forms of anti-late-capitalist engagement and paradoxical empowerment. The six epimodernist values would now be: Superficiality, Secret, Energy, Acceleration, Credit, and (again) Consistency. Epimodernism thus represents a way to help us foresee what literature can describe, imagine, or invent for our difficult times, as in the most recent book by Sandra Lucbert: Personne ne sort les fusils.

Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere è una rivista annuale a stampa e online ad accesso aperto del Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici dell’Università di Trieste (DiSU), pubblicata dal 1994 presso la casa editrice EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste. È apparsa in precedenza con il complemento di titolo Rivista di letterature e civiltà Anglo-germaniche e, dal 2005 al 2011, con quello di Rivista di Letterature straniere, Comparatistica e Studi culturali. La rivista pubblica contributi originali dedicati alle letterature di lingua inglese, tedesca e francese. Prospero ospita contributi inediti di studiosi italiani e stranieri che pongono il testo letterario e l’analisi testuale al centro di più ampie riflessioni di carattere ermeneutico, filologico e storico-culturale. In particolare, si apre alle convergenze di carattere interdisciplinare e transdisciplinare tra la letteratura e gli altri saperi. Numeri monografici curati da guest editors italiani e stranieri su temi specifici si alternano a numeri miscellanei.

Socioterminology is an approach to technical and scientific languages which describes their effects ad uses in different discursive contexts, especially non-technical, and in the context of translation practices. However, several textual fields remain unexplored: this article aims to analyze the French translation of an Italian literary text, Primo Levi’s Il sistema periodico (1975), a ‘biography' of his professional career as a chemist. The novel (organized through a series of chapters, each devoted to an element of the periodic table) is typologically ambiguous. “Questo non è un trattato di chimica” (« this is not a chemical treatise »), says the author at the beginning of the last chapter, while suggesting the porosity that exists between discursive genres (technical-scientific; fictional). We aim to analyze the French translation (Le système périodique, 1987, trad. André Maugé) in order to account for the symbolic and literary uses of terminologies, their contextualization in literary discourse and the interlinguistic and intercultural relationship between Italian and French.

The novel Trutz Simplex of the baroque author Grimmelshausen inspired one of the most popular female main characters of the Brechtian epic theatre, namely the protagonist of the drama Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder. This play is evident proof of Brecht’s interest in the German baroque novelist and at the same time one of the most creative and unconventional contributions to the rediscovery of his work in the 20th century. The figure of Courage and the central theme of war which the drama and the novel have in common render the connection between the two authors explicit enough. However, the relationship Brecht established with Grimmelshausen is deeper and more complex than a series of superficial points of contacts which can be found in their literary production. By retracing the references to the baroque novelist in Brecht’s drafts and programmatic writings, it can be proved that Grimmelshausen’s oeuvre was not only a thematic source of inspiration for the Augsburger playwright, but also played a role in his poetological and socio-cultural reflection. The aim of this article is to outline the meaning of Brecht’s Grimmelshausen-reception in the theoretical program of epic theatre and, more generally, in Brecht’s aesthetic research.