C. Bruna Mancini

Arianna Maiorani

This truly multidisciplinary book explores how culture-founding terms like ‘space’ and ‘place’ have been reconsidered, re-elaborated and how they have acquired new meanings through academic research that crosses the traditional borderline between the humanities and social sciences. All chapters explore from different perspectives how the notions of space and place are still modelling our sense of reality by investigating social and cultural phenomena of various types that evolved between the 20th and 21st centuries. The essays collected here provide evidence of the growing necessity of building bridges across disciplines to allow knowledge, in general, and academic work, in particular, to work towards new forms of epistemology. The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students in the areas of cultural studies, discourse analysis, multimodality, communication and media, linguistics, literary and film studies, anthropology and ethnography.

Rethinking Dimensions across Disciplines

Space and Place as Human Coordinates

David Punter

This book provides a series of new addresses to the enduring problem of how to categorize the Fantastic. The approach taken is through the lens of spatiality; the Fantastic gives us new worlds, although of course these are refractions of worlds already in being. In place of ‘real’ spaces (whatever they might be), the Fantastic gives us imaginary spaces, although within those spaces historical and cultural conflicts are played out, albeit in forms that stretch our understanding of everyday location, and our usual interpretations of cause and effect. Many authors are addressed here, from a variety of different geographical and national traditions, thus demonstrating how the Fantastic - as a mode, a genre, a way of thinking, imagining and writing - continually traverses borders and boundaries. We hope to move the ongoing debate about the Fantastic forward in a scholarly as well as an engaging way.

A 21st Century Manifesto

Space(s) of the Fantastic

Cosa si intende per “femminilità”? Quali spazi e quali luoghi vi sono associati? Per quale ragione avvengono queste connessioni? Ma, soprattutto, spazi e luoghi possono contribuire a delimitare, restringere o allargare i confini dei concetti di genere/gender dei corpi? Passando in rassegna alcuni tra gli spazi e i luoghi più ricorrenti nella letteratura inglese tra Settecento e Ottocento – nei testi (canonici e non) scritti da uomini e soprattutto da donne, più o meno famose – possiamo forse seguire le tracce di questi mutamenti. Case, boudoir, salotti, focolari, postriboli, prigioni, tribunali, scuole, librerie, manicomi e soffitte, ma anche luoghi all’aperto, en plein air, fino a raggiungere le nuvole, possono diventare “maniglie teoriche” o puntelli ideologici cui afferrarsi per delineare questo percorso letterario e culturale nella costruzione del concetto di “femminile”: un costrutto culturale mutevole, complesso, fluido, determinante dal punto di vista sociale ed economico, che va a interagire con le categorie – altrettanto significative – di classe, ruolo sociale e sessuale, istruzione/educazione e potere.

C. Bruna Mancini

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