Description
Book SynopsisThis volume explores Italian science fiction from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, covering literary texts, films, music and visual works by figures as diverse as Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Peter Kolosimo, Primo Levi, Antonio Margheriti, Gilda Musa and Roberto Vacca. It broadens the horizons of both Italian studies and the environmental humanities by addressing a long-neglected genre, and expands our understanding of relations between the ecological, the imaginary and the sociopolitical. The chapters draw on a variety of methodological frameworks, including animal studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, eco-media studies, energy humanities and posthumanism. The reader will gain insights into consequential topics such as anthropocentrism/speciesism, ecomodernist thought, environmental justice struggles at the planetary and regional level, non-human and new materialist ontologies, utopian/dystopian philosophies and prospects for transitioning beyond the crisis of petro-modernity through the construction of post-depletion futures.
Open Access versions of the introduction and six of the book chapters are available on the Liverpool University Press website.
Trade Review‘This collection of essays takes the reader to the uncanny territory of Italian science fiction, a world animated by apocalyptic fantasies and ecological dystopias, consumerist annihilations and nonhuman socialities. In an epoch of multiple planetary crises, this revelatory book is a must-read for any archaeologist of the present.’ Federico Luisetti, University of St. Gallen
‘If Italian culture has an ecological unconscious, that unconscious is embodied in science fiction. Rarely do so many creative motifs converge in the imagination of our species and the planet within a single literary genre: there are the anxieties of the automaton as an other-than-human, encounters with our spatio-temporal otherness, technological apocalypses, dilemmas of hybridity with real and imaginary life forms, and the desires of new socio-energetic utopias. With a perspective that encompasses cinema, art, and literature, ranging from great classics like Buzzati, Levi, Calvino, and Scerbanenco to “alien archaeologies” and solarpunk, Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental Humanities retrieves this unconscious and inaugurates the entrance of Italian science fiction into the international eco-literary canon. A futuristic and pioneering book that rightfully joins the essential references of environmental humanities studies.’ Serenella Iovino, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Greening Italian Science Fiction – New Approaches to a Long-Lasting Genre
Daniel A. Finch-Race, Emiliano Guaraldo, Marco Malvestio
Section I: Science in the Anthropocene
Herbert Pagani’s Mégalopolis: A Rock Opera between Dystopian Science Fiction and Ecological Utopia
Eleonora Lima
Cultural and Ecological Extinction in Primo Levi’s Science-Fiction
Michele Maiolani
What Kind of Science? Italian Science Fiction Writers against the Economic Boom
Daniele Comberiati
Section II: Visions of Extinction
Ecofeminist Care at the End of the World: Collaborative Survival in Niccolò Ammaniti’s Anna and Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s L’isola delle Madri
Raffaella Baccolini and Chiara Xausa
Barbarism, Animalization, and the End of the World: Fantasies of Regression and Mutation in Italian Science Fiction
Simona Micali
A Post-Apocalyptic Garden of Eden. Marco Ferreri’s Il Seme dell’Uomo
Emiliano Guaraldo
Section III: Urban Landscapes and Industrial Capitalism in a Rapidly Changing Country
Industrial Wonders and Pitfalls in Émile Souvestre’s Le Monde tel qu’il sera en l’an 3000 (1846) and Agostino della Sala Spada’s Nel 2073! (1874)
Daniel A. Finch-Race
Spaceships in the Anthropocene: Peter Kolosimo and the End of (Our) Times
Marco Malvestio
Uncanny Spaces in Inhuman Times: The Art of Giacomo Costa
Matteo Gilebbi
Against Eco-Fascism: Space and Place in Tullio Avoledo’s Furland
Florian Mussgnug
Section IV: Posthuman, More-than-Human, and Interspecies Relations
Green Traces: Vegetal Imagination in Italian Science Fiction from Gilda Musa to Solarpunk
Enrico Cesaretti
Bonsai Children, Enchanted Gardens: Nature as Artifice in Paolo Zanotti’s Dystopian Fairy Tale
Valentina Fulginiti
‘All We Need is Love’?: Eros, Agape, and Koinonia in the Time of Mass Extinction
Danila Cannamela
Eco-Horror: Human-Animal Encounters in Italian Science-Fiction Films
Robert A. Rushing
Solarpunk, or rather Solartivismo: An Interview with Francesco Verso
Arielle Saiber
