Silvia Antosa | Università per Stranieri di Siena (original) (raw)

Books by Silvia Antosa

Mimesis, 2021

Drawing together established and emerging scholars, this collection seeks to address some of the ... more Drawing together established and emerging scholars, this collection seeks to address some of the most recent developments in the fields of food studies and Victorian culture. Contributors explore national and inter/intranational representations of food, by examining multiple texts ranging from “canonical” literature to popular culture and marginal sub-cultures. Focusing on the underside of Victorian society’s optimistic belief in progress, this volume suggests that the nineteenth century was not only marked by the dining etiquette and the culinary innovations promoted by manuals such as Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management. It was also a century of deviant food practices which gave voice to multifarious anxieties about ingestion and consumption. In line with the latest publications of the field, this collection investigates the transgressive facets of food in the representation of racial and gendered identities, in questions of taste and commodification, and more broadly, in the political, social and economic arena of the Victorian era.
Chapters by Silvia Antosa, Ilaria Berti, Claudia Capancioni, Maria Teresa Chialant, Silvana Colella, Emanuela Ettorre, William Greenslade, Pam Lock, Jude V. Nixon, Francesca Orestano, Oriana Palusci, Maria Parrino, Kim Salmons, Marilena Saracino, Eleonora Sasso, Luisa Villa.

Frances Elliot was a British Victorian writer and traveller. She spent most of her life in Italy ... more Frances Elliot was a British Victorian writer and traveller. She spent most of her life in Italy to which she dedicated much of her work: travelogues, social histories and various critical articles. This book identifies and critically analyses the strategies that she uses in her texts to construct an image of the Italian peninsula for her British contemporaries.

I saggi che compongono questo volume indagano i campi teorici e tematici delle sex(t)ualities, ov... more I saggi che compongono questo volume indagano i campi teorici e tematici delle
sex(t)ualities, ovvero le costruzioni e raffigurazioni testuali delle sessualità, con l’intento di decostruirne gli assiomi essenzialisti che in passato ne hanno caratterizzato l’elaborazione e la categorizzazione. Pertanto, l’analisi delle sex(t)ualities attinge a piene mani dalle ossessioni culturali verso le raffigurazioni delle sessualità che attraversano il contesto contemporaneo. A
tal fine, i saggi che qui vengono presentati dispiegano una stimolante prospettiva multidisciplinare, dai cinema e film studies alla letteratura comparata e agli studi culturali, con cui rintracciare in testi filmici, televisivi, in narrazioni letterarie, nel mercato di massa del porno così nelle sue sottoculture e negli
emergenti immaginari tecnologici, le molteplici morfologie che il corpo sessualizzato assume nelle sue rappresentazioni e nelle sue costruzioni come entità politica.

Nel 2016, l’Università di Enna «Kore» ha voluto partecipare ai festeggiamenti per il quarto cente... more Nel 2016, l’Università di Enna «Kore» ha voluto partecipare ai festeggiamenti per il quarto centenario della morte dei due capisaldi della letteratura moderna
europea e mondiale con un convegno interdisciplinare organizzato da Silvia Antosa e Antonietta T. Messina Fajardo. Gli atti di tale iniziativa congressuale sono raccolti in questo volume, che esplora in una pluralità di direzioni e punti di vista differenziati l’attenzione su entrambi gli autori e soprattutto mette in luce come i capolavori dei due autori continuino a influenzare le scelte degli scrittori contemporanei non solo in Inghilterra e in Spagna ma a livello transnazionale.

Textus. English Studies in Italy, 2015

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018

How did Victorian travellers define and challenge the notion of Empire? How did the multiple form... more How did Victorian travellers define and challenge the notion of Empire? How did the multiple forms of Victorian travel literature, such as fiction, travel accounts, newspapers, and poetry, shape perceptions of imperial and national spaces, in the British context and beyond? This collection examines how, in the Victorian era, space and empire were shaped around the notion of boundaries, by travel narratives and practices, and from a variety of methodological and critical perspectives. From the travel writings of artists and polymaths such as Carmen Sylva and Richard Burton, to a reassessment of Rudyard Kipling’s, H. G. Wells’s and Julia Pardoe’s cross-cultural and cross-gender travels, this collection assesses a broad range of canonical and lesser-studied Victorian travel texts and genres, and evaluates the representation of empires, nations, and individual identity in travel accounts covering Europe, Asia, Africa and Britain.

This volume offers a critical insight into the life and work of the controversial Victorian explo... more This volume offers a critical insight into the life and work of the controversial Victorian explorer and translator Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890). Analysis focuses on his travel accounts and erotic translations, which both re-elaborated and challenged dominant Victorian discourses on race, gender and sexuality, generating controversies in the fields of anthropology, sexology and medicine. The premise of the study is that Burton entertained an ambiguous relationship with the colonial institutions: on the one hand, he pursued the colonial project, while on the other, he was an irreverent outsider who clashed with the imperial authorities. As this investigation reveals, he defied British sociocultural norms by appropriating and importing the rituals and languages of the colonial subjects. The volume examines Burton’s ‘impersonations’ of multiple masculine identities in the countries that he visited, which involved elaborate processes of
both identification and dis-identification. The author argues that these impersonations enabled a series of queer encounters which broke down the barriers between imperial Self and colonised Other, and led Burton to embody several self-conscious, performative constructions of masculinity. Burton’s life and works are analysed in light of recent critical and theoretical debates

"The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of writings on queer theories and practices.Drawin... more "The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of writings on queer theories and practices.Drawing together established and emerging scholars in the field, this volume offers a broad, trans-disciplinary and international approach to queer studies. In the light of recent critical perspectives, it proposes a number of theoretical developments concerning three key thematic fields: theories, bodies and texts. The first section of the volume considers the embodied, sexed and gendered self and its problematic relation with queer theories, animal studies as well as with the representation of non-human and intersex identities. The second section explores a variety of modes of representation, – and/or misrepresentation – of queer embodied subjectivities, ranging from literature to media and performance. In analysing a variety of classic and contemporary texts, the contributors call into question
and reconceptualise key issues such as queer subjectivity, homophobia, gender performativity, masquerade and cross-dressing."

The book engages critically with two main aspects of the socio-cultural construction of gender an... more The book engages critically with two main aspects of the socio-cultural construction of gender and sexuality. The first section of the volume, Sexual Rights, is socio-political, and includes both the problem of the recognition of rights for all individuals, especially LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer and intersexual) subjects, and the struggle to combat discrimination, that entails an analysis of and an opposition to homophobic discourses and actions. The second section of the volume, Media, Literature and Performativity, involves a theoretical elaboration of discursive and literary strategies that relate or can be applied to gendered and sexed identities. These two spheres of investigation have been addressed by the contributors to this volume using a variety of analytical approaches that are informed by and engage with recent developments in the field of gender and sexuality studies.

Since the publication of her first novel, Jeanette Winterson has been acclaimed as one of the mos... more Since the publication of her first novel, Jeanette Winterson has been acclaimed as one of the most promising writers on the English postmodern literary scene. This study takes into consideration seven works, from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) to The PowerBook (2000) in which Winterson codifies bodies as culturally constructed signs which can be re-signified and transformed. The strategies she adopts to remodel the body reveal a narrative itinerary that goes from the assertion of the lesbian body of the protagonist in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit to the virtual bodies of the interactive world in The PowerBook. Crossing Boundaries investigates the way in which Winterson works out new bodily paradigms to subvert the effects of social power mechanisms and to dismantle the constructedness of sexual categories and gender differences. In re-mapping bodily boundaries, she also proves that there are almost unlimited possibilities to (de)construct patterns of identity and to remould reality as complex and many-sided.

La collana Omosapiens: studi e ricerche sugli orientamenti sessuali nasce con il sostegno dell’As... more La collana Omosapiens: studi e ricerche sugli orientamenti sessuali nasce con il sostegno dell’Associazione culturale Di’Gay Project (DGP) di Roma ed è coordinata da Domenico Rizzo. Il secondo volume della collana, Spazi e identità queer si propone di esaminare a livello interdisciplinare il dibattito politico e ideologico incentrato sulla complessa relazione tra sessualità, identità di genere e spazio. Nella prima sezione sono raccolti contributi che discutono il ruolo che alcuni spazi sociali, istituzionali e non — la scuola, la famiglia, la società, la Chiesa, e gli stessi gruppi gay, lesbici, bisessuali, transessuali e queer (GLBTQ) — hanno nel processo di formazione identitaria. La seconda parte del volume è dedicata al problema dei confini, identitari e spaziali. In gioco sono infatti la sottile demarcazione tra identità nazionale eteronormativa e alterità (omo)sessuale, tra spazio pubblico e vita privata, tra spazi della narrazione e spazi di vita vissuta. L’ultima sezione raccoglie interventi sugli spazi transgender, ognuno dei quali riferisce di luoghi in cui sono inscritte traiettorie esperienziali diverse: Porto, Palermo e San Francisco. Completano il volume una rassegna bibliografica su spazi e identità queer, un quadro critico sui recenti studi GLBTQ in Polonia e area dell’ex-Jugoslavia, e una aggiornata bibliografia finale. Omosapiens.2include saggi a firma di studiosi provenienti dal mondo accademico italiano ed internazionale, e vede la partecipazione dei vincitori del premio tesi di laurea e di dottorato "Maria Baiocchi", organizzato da DGP.

Articles by Silvia Antosa

de genere. Rivista di studi letterari, postcoloniali e di genere, 2021

She has published extensively on Victorian fiction, nineteenth-century travel accounts and contem... more She has published extensively on Victorian fiction, nineteenth-century travel accounts and contemporary British novels. Antosa has edited several interdisciplinary volumes on queer theories. She is a member of the Board of the Italian Association of English Studies (AIA), the co-editor of the Series AngloSophia. Studi di Letteratura e Cultura Inglese (Mimesis) and a member of the editorial board of Textus. English Studies in Italy. She is currently working on a project funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust on "Cultural Discourses on Desire between Women: A Queer Comparative Analysis" (with the University of Birmingham, UK) as well as on a project on Decadent Pedagogies funded by the ESSE Collaborative Project Workshop Scheme 2022.

TRANSGRESSIVE APPETITES Deviant Food Practices in Victorian Literature and Culture, 2021

Textus. English Studies in Italy 34, 2, 2021

This article analyses the representation of the British National Health Service (NHS) in Governme... more This article analyses the representation of the British National Health
Service (NHS) in Government communication and news media in Britain
as a crucial discursive figure of British national identity both during the
months preceding the Brexit referendum of June 2016 and in the early
months of the diffusion of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. We focus
on a number of issues regarding the ways in which the NHS has been
portrayed in the public arena. Both during the Brexit campaign and at the
onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the NHS was adopted as a powerful
unifying national symbol to be protected, thanks to a populist language
based on the adoption of quasi-religious tropes and mythical themes, war
metaphors, and praise for heroism. This populist language was charged
with rhetorical messages and slogans which turned the NHS into an image
of Britishness, as emerges especially from an analysis of the leading frontpage articles from the right-wing newspaper Daily Mail in the early phases of the pandemic.

Altre Modernita, 19, 2018

Dossier Studi culturali in Italia Numero speciale di Altre Modernità dedicato al delicato rappor... more Dossier Studi culturali in Italia
Numero speciale di Altre Modernità dedicato al delicato rapporto tra Studi culturali e università italiana

William Shakespeare e Miguel de Cervantes. I pilastri della modernità, 2018

Sex(t)ualities. Morfologie del corpo tra visioni e narrazioni , 2018

Gender and Sexuality. Rights, Language and Performativity, 2012

The Series "Personal Development and the Exercise of Human Rights" welcomes interdisciplinary wor... more The Series "Personal Development and the Exercise of Human Rights" welcomes interdisciplinary works that investigate any aspect of the relationship between personal development and the exercise of human rights, and which may employ a variety of methodological and analytical tools. This Series is inspired by research in the field of neuropsychology, in which men and women are conceived as active agents of themselves and their surrounding environments. Human actions can thus be understood in relation to the degree of coercion or valorisation of individual capabilities; they are produced by the interaction between these capabilities and the system of social action that opposes or favours their deployment, in the elaboration and realisation of each individual life project.

Queer Crossings. Theories, Bodies, Texts, 2012

Omosapiens 2. Studi e ricerche sugli orientamenti sessuali , 2007

Studi e ricerche sugli orientamenti sessuali / 2 coordinamento di Domenico Rizzo Associazione cul... more Studi e ricerche sugli orientamenti sessuali / 2 coordinamento di Domenico Rizzo Associazione culturale Di'Gay Project DGP onlus -Roma Omosapiens2B.qxd 20-11-2008 12:29 Pagina i Di'Gay Project DGP nasce a Roma nel 2001 e sua Presidente è Imma Battaglia, ideatrice del World Gay Pride 2000 di Roma. Di' rappresenta il coraggio di dirlo; Gay sintetizza le differenze di orientamento sessuale e identità di genere; Project la volontà di costruire con progetti concreti un nuovo percorso per i diritti umani delle persone gay, lesbiche, bisessuali, transessuali/transgender (GLBT).

Mimesis, 2021

Textus. English Studies in Italy, 2015

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018

de genere. Rivista di studi letterari, postcoloniali e di genere, 2021

TRANSGRESSIVE APPETITES Deviant Food Practices in Victorian Literature and Culture, 2021

Textus. English Studies in Italy 34, 2, 2021

Altre Modernita, 19, 2018

William Shakespeare e Miguel de Cervantes. I pilastri della modernità, 2018

Sex(t)ualities. Morfologie del corpo tra visioni e narrazioni , 2018

Gender and Sexuality. Rights, Language and Performativity, 2012

Queer Crossings. Theories, Bodies, Texts, 2012

Omosapiens 2. Studi e ricerche sugli orientamenti sessuali , 2007

Victorian Challenges. La ricerca del nuovo nella letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento, 2020

Textus. English Studies in Italy, 2, 2019, pp. 195-213, 2019

This paper discusses the work of contemporary British poet and spoken word performer Kate Tempest... more This paper discusses the work of contemporary British poet and spoken
word performer Kate Tempest, whose postmodern poems challenge the
triangular relationship between written and/or performed text, the role of
the author and/as performer, and the traditional function of the (reading)
audience. It argues that her work questions in productive ways crucial
issues like authorship, ethical responsibility, inter- and transmedial textual
plurality, reception and oral narration. In Brand New Ancients (2013) in
particular, Tempest questions and deconstructs the form and the structure
of traditional epics by reversing a number of key features. Set in the
contemporary age, Tempest’s poem breaks down sociocultural boundaries
such as, for example, those between high and low, Gods or semi-divine
figures and lower-class, disenfranchised mortals and, in a metanarrative
move, between the figure of the poet and the readers/listeners, who are
transformed into potential members of an interactive postmodern dramatic
chorus. In this way, Tempest gives voice to a potentially endless spectrum of voiceless and marginalised subjectivities, whose subaltern status is erased in this new poetic hierarchy-free (inter)textual space where opposites can co-exist.

Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, 1, 1, Spring 2019, ISSN: 2632-4253, pp. 57-79. , 2019

Isabel Arundell Burton (1831-96), was a Victorian writer and traveller, married to the famous Bri... more Isabel Arundell Burton (1831-96), was a Victorian writer and traveller, married to the famous British explorer, translator, and Consul Richard Francis Burton (1821-90). This article focuses on her 1875 travel account, Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Land, because it is her first, sustained attempt to shape her public persona and to construct a convincing role for herself as devout wife, while leading a life that was ultimately unconventional. As I argue, in her fictionalised account she creates an ambivalent narrative of her life and travel experiences, in which she reconciled two opposing models of female subjectivity: the conventional myth of the angel in the house and the "transgressive" woman traveller. This article focuses on the formal strategies that Isabel adopts to construct a narrative that was acceptable to the Victorian readership and editorial market, including her declared attempt to "domesticate" her own potentially subversive agency. The article analyses the gendered discourses embedded in her word, especially those regarding women's complicity with and resistance to colonial constructions of femininity. Isabel draws on the consolidated image of the "traveller's wife" to forge a potentially new paradigm, the "Travelling Angel in the House," which reinforced the values of domesticity and submission while also partially legitimising women's access to public, masculine spaces. Furthermore, with reference to work by Mary Louise Pratt, I discuss the textual strategies that Isabel adopts to claim that she has remained immune to the process of transculturation by reinforcing her national and social identity of upper-class English woman. Overall, I demonstrate that Isabel's "Travelling Angel in the House" is animated by dynamic and unstable tensions, which derive from her attempts to simultaneously conform to and transgress dominant norms of the period.

Ácoma - Rivista Internazionale di Studi Nord-Americani, 16, Primavera-Estate 2019, ISSN: 2421-423X, pp. 79-92, 2019

This article examines how the notion of normative, nuclear family is questioned, dismantled and e... more This article examines how the notion of normative, nuclear family is questioned, dismantled and expanded in Michael Cunningham’s novel A Home at the End of the World (1990). Told in four different voices, the story focuses on two young boys who grow up in Cleveland in the 1970s and who come from different social backgrounds. As I argue, in this novel Cunningham narrativizes the process of reconstructing or forging ‘alternative’ queer family and kinship bonds, and demonstrates that both blood, biological and affective, nonbiological ties are all transient and subject to change. Moreover, by drawing on trauma studies, I discuss the extent to which macro- and microtraumas affect the characters’ lives, as is clear from the different perspectives provided by the four narrators. Ultimately, what emerges from their narratives is the need to articulate and transform deep emotional traumas into a never-ending search for the self and love.

Contact Zones: Cultural, Linguistic and Literary Connections in English, a cura di Maria Micaela Coppola, Francesca Di Blasio e Sabrina Francesconi, Collana Labirinti, Università degli Studi di Trento, ISBN 978-88-8443-852-2, pp. 75-88, 2019

Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism, 3, 2018

Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel: Spaces, Nations and Empires, edited by Barbara Franchi and Elvan Mutlu, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018

(Post)Colonial Passages: Incursions and Excursions across the Literatures and Cultures in English Edited by Silvia Albertazzi, Francesco Cattani, Rita Monticelli and Federica Zullo , 2018

William Shakespeare e Miguel de Cervantes I pilastri della modernità a cura di Silvia Antosa Trinis Antonietta Messina Fajardo, Clueb, 2018

Progetto grafico di copertina di Oriano Sportelli (www.studionegativo.com).

"Miss Man? Languaging Gendered Bodies", edited by Giuseppe Balirano and Oriana Palusci, Cambridge Scholars, 2018

In this essay, I explore how these issues are reworked and deconstructed by Stephen King in his ... more In this essay, I explore how these issues are reworked
and deconstructed by Stephen King in his 1992 novel
Gerald’s Game. Significantly, in this text, King subverts the
triangular structure villain-father-heroine by gradually reversing
the female character’s role, as she evolves from a
passive, vulnerable victim to an active protagonist of the
story. Such a change is possible only through her confronting
and overcoming the “buried, ominous secret”: a traumatic
event of sexual abuse which she experienced in her childhood. I demonstrate that the issues of vulnerability and trauma are central to a feminist reworking in a contemporary
key of traditional Gothic-horror tropes, themes and
characterisation.

HAL, 2017

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01436611

Il grado di complessità della società contemporanea, costituita dalla compresenza su uno stesso p... more Il grado di complessità della società contemporanea, costituita dalla compresenza su uno stesso piano di elementi e concetti che sfuggono a logiche interpretative tradizionali, trova uno dei suoi più forti riflessi nella queer culture. All'interno di questo contesto, il merito dei queer studies è quello di proporre una varietà di incroci disciplinari e di superare posizioni teoriche consolidate, cominciando a problematizzarle. Come ricorda puntualmente nell'introduzione Silvia Antosa, curatrice del volume Queer Crossings Theories, Bodies, Texts, i tre testi fondamentali da cui si fanno partire gli studi sul queer (quelli di Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler e Teresa De Lauretis) vedevano la luce in un momento storico difficile, segnato dal rischio di una dilagante ondata omofobica causata dalla diffusione del virus dell'HIV e dalla necessità di rivedere le teorizzazioni femministe sul genere e la sessualità. Se agli inizi degli anni '90 le teorie queer hanno destabilizzato alcune posizioni teoriche del femminismo e i discorsi integrazionisti dei movimenti gay, ora il queer, nella sua essenza di termine "ombrello" e nel dubbio se considerarsi un sistema di pensiero o una metodologia, approfondisce le sue riflessioni sui concetti di identità e soggettività, di corpo e di "essere umano", arrivando anche a proporre di ripensare il concetto di "umanità" tout court. A questi e altri quesiti si rivolge il testo curato da Antosa, che punta a riferire la pluralità e la transdisciplinarità di cui sono vettori le teorie e gli studi sul queer. Nato dall'esperienza di un convegno tenuto nel Giugno 2010 a Palermo, organizzato dalla curatrice assieme a Elisabetta Di Giovanni, Queer Crossings comprende i saggi di studiosi

Per i practitioners più moderni di quel recente approccio critico che va sotto il nome di ecocrit... more Per i practitioners più moderni di quel recente approccio critico che va sotto il nome di ecocriticism, il volume offre una visione inedita del medioevo e della sua natura, rivelando un rapporto per noi sorprendente e lontano dalle visioni stereotipate delle fusioni paniche medievali. Qualche perplessità può forse giungere dall'amplissimo time-span prescelto (un millennio: dal 500 al 1500), oltre che dall'analogamente smisurato territorio posto sotto osservazione (dall'Inghilterra alla Spagna, dal Baltico all'Europa orientale), ma senza che questo infici l'utilità di uno studio che si pone, per la medievistica, come importante backgound reading di chi vuole rileggere testi classici, e non, alla luce dei rapporti spesso travagliati tra uomo e ambiente. (PC)

Il nuovo volume edito dalla casa editrice Mimesis all'interno della ormai corposa collana di stud... more Il nuovo volume edito dalla casa editrice Mimesis all'interno della ormai corposa collana di studi LGBT diretta da Francesco Bilotta, si propone di affrontare un argomento molto complesso, quello dei queer studies. Definire che cosa sia il queer è un compito alquanto arduo, poiché esso, per definizione, si situa non in determinati modi di essere, ma negli spazi interstiziali tra un'identità e l'altra.

Lo straniero, n. 137, Nov 2011

Bazar. Cultura e intrattenimento intelligente

La collana intende trattare secondo una prospettiva interdisciplinare e trans-disciplinare i temi... more La collana intende trattare secondo una prospettiva interdisciplinare e trans-disciplinare i temi "liminali", "marginali", di confine, di intersezione e di interstizialità. Sollecitando il dibattito intorno alla riflessione di nuove prospettive emergenti e a metodi e metodologie di ricerca che problematizzano la "standardizzazione" acritica, la collana vuole interrogare(rsi) sulle differenze e sulle divergenze delle società contemporanee, tra nuovi centri, riproduzione dei confini e le loro interconnessioni. Liminalia intende leggere queste implicazioni interpretando le transizioni del reale, nei sui assetti dati per scontati, nelle sue pieghe o nelle sue interruzioni, considerando i rapporti dialettici esistenti fra i diversi confini e fra questi e i diversi centri, rispetto ai temi dei corpi, dei loro flussi e spostamenti, dei generi e delle sessualità, delle razze, delle pratiche normalizzanti e del controllo così come delle pratiche "devianti", resistenti, contro-culturali.

$Research paper thumbnail of Speeding Your Way to Darkness': suicidio postmoderno e ricerca d'identit\ue0 in "Night Train" di Martin Amis$

Fogli di Anglistica, IV, 7-8, 2010, pp. 163-176., 2010

Textus. English Studies in Italy, 2, 2019, pp. 195-213, 2019

This paper discusses the work of contemporary British poet and spoken word performer Kate Tempest... more This paper discusses the work of contemporary British poet and spoken word performer Kate Tempest, whose postmodern poems challenge the triangular relationship between written and/or performed text, the role of the author and/as performer, and the traditional function of the (reading) audience. It argues that her work questions in productive ways crucial issues like authorship, ethical responsibility, inter- and transmedial textual plurality, reception and oral narration. In Brand New Ancients (2013) in particular, Tempest questions and deconstructs the form and the structure of traditional epics by reversing a number of key features. Set in the contemporary age, Tempest’s poem breaks down sociocultural boundaries such as, for example, those between high and low, Gods or semi-divine figures and lower-class, disenfranchised mortals and, in a metanarrative move, between the figure of the poet and the readers/listeners, who are transformed into potential members of an interactive postmodern dramatic chorus. In this way, Tempest gives voice to a potentially endless spectrum of voiceless and marginalised subjectivities, whose subaltern status is erased in this new poetic hierarchy-free (inter)textual space where opposites can co-exist.

Textus. English Studies in Italy, 2, 2019, pp. 195-213, 2019

This paper discusses the work of contemporary British poet and spoken word performer Kate Tempest... more This paper discusses the work of contemporary British poet and spoken word performer Kate Tempest, whose postmodern poems challenge the triangular relationship between written and/or performed text, the role of the author and/as performer, and the traditional function of the (reading) audience. It argues that her work questions in productive ways crucial issues like authorship, ethical responsibility, inter- and transmedial textual plurality, reception and oral narration. In Brand New Ancients (2013) in particular, Tempest questions and deconstructs the form and the structure of traditional epics by reversing a number of key features. Set in the contemporary age, Tempest’s poem breaks down sociocultural boundaries such as, for example, those between high and low, Gods or semi-divine figures and lower-class, disenfranchised mortals and, in a metanarrative move, between the figure of the poet and the readers/listeners, who are transformed into potential members of an interactive postmodern dramatic chorus. In this way, Tempest gives voice to a potentially endless spectrum of voiceless and marginalised subjectivities, whose subaltern status is erased in this new poetic hierarchy-free (inter)textual space where opposites can co-exist.

Contents: Nation and Empire: Late Victorian Discourses on Race, Gender and Sexuality - Richard F.... more Contents: Nation and Empire: Late Victorian Discourses on Race, Gender and Sexuality - Richard F. Burton's Travel Writings: Queer Performative Encounters and Male Homosociality - Burton's Oriental Translations: The Exotic and the Erotic.

Collana che nasce con lo scopo di tradurre in italiano e far conoscere testi teatrali che si inte... more Collana che nasce con lo scopo di tradurre in italiano e far conoscere testi teatrali che si interessano ai temi della migrazione e dell'integrazione

Studies in Travel Writing, 2019

The article evaluates the impact that the emerging scientific discourses had on the literary prod... more The article evaluates the impact that the emerging scientific discourses had on the literary production of the second half of the nineteenth century in Englan

This article analyses the representation of the British National Health Service (NHS) in Governme... more This article analyses the representation of the British National Health Service (NHS) in Government communication and news media in Britain as a crucial discursive figure of British national identity both during the months preceding the Brexit referendum of June 2016 and in the early months of the diffusion of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. We focus on a number of issues regarding the ways in which the NHS has been portrayed in the public arena. Both during the Brexit campaign and at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the NHS was adopted as a powerful unifying national symbol to be protected, thanks to a populist language based on the adoption of quasi-religious tropes and mythical themes, war metaphors, and praise for heroism. This populist language was charged with rhetorical messages and slogans which turned the NHS into an image of Britishness, as emerges especially from an analysis of the leading front-page articles from the right-wing newspaper Daily Mail in the early phases of the pandemic. Keywords: NHS, Brexit, Britishness, Covid-19, nationalism, pandemic, Daily Mail.

Poster and program of the International Conference "Generi di confine: attraversamenti, scritture... more Poster and program of the International Conference "Generi di confine: attraversamenti, scritture, culture" – "Bordering Genders/Genres/Genera: Crossings, Writings, Cultures"

March 26, 2021: online (Microsoft Teams)

Convened by Silvia Antosa (“Kore” University of Enna), Mariaconcetta Costantini ("G. d'Annunzio" University of Chieti-Pescara) and Mara Mattoscio ("G. d'Annunzio" University of Chieti-Pescara)