Sidia Fiorato - Böcker

The volume presents a journey into Alice's Wonderland as a world of morphing possibilities. In a constant dialogue with Victorian codifications, Alice learns to define her identity and at the same time presents critical insights into her own cultural milieu. Alice appears to be on the threshold upon different systems of reference which she actively investigates through a specific involvement with Victorian institutions such as the family, the law and education. The analysis focusses in particular on her quest for her own identity, developed throughout Carroll's text as well as in later adaptations, and from the perspective of food studies. It combines Alice's narrative and theatrical/balletic body in a new experience of Wonderland as a cultural palimpsest that brings to expression contemporary reverberations of Victorian solicitations. The volume highlights the power of Carroll's text which already prefigures its ever renewing cultural impact as a template for storytelling.

In the Renaissance period the body emerges as the repository of social and cultural forces and a privileged metaphor for political practices and legal codification. Due to its ambivalent expressive force, it represents the seat and the means for the performance of normative identity and at the same time of alterity. The essays of the collection address the manifold articulations of this topic, demonstrating how the inscription of the body within the discursive spheres of gender identity, sexuality, law, and politics align its materiality with discourses whose effects are themselves material. The aesthetic and performative dimension of law inform the debates on the juridical constitution of authority, as well as its reflection on the formation and the moulding of individual subjectivity. Moreover, the inherently theatrical elements of the law find an analogy in the popular theatre, where juridical practices are represented, challenged, occasionally subverted or created. The works analyzed in the volume, in their ample spectre of topics and contexts aim at demonstrating how in the Renaissance period the body was the privileged focus of the social, legal and cultural imagination.

This volume investigates interdisciplinary intersections between law and the humanities from the Renaissance to the present day. It allows for fruitful encounters between different disciplines: from literature to science, from the visual arts to the post-human, from the postmodern novel’s experimentation to most recent approaches towards the legal interpretation of literary texts. This productive dialogue fosters original perspectives in the interpretation of and reflection upon identity, justice, power and human rights and values, thus underlining the role of literature in the articulation of relevant cultural issues pertaining to specific periods.

This collection explores the heterogeneous places we have traditionally been taught to term ‘islands.’ It stages a conversation on the very idea of ‘island-ness’, thus contributing to a new field of research at the crossroads of law, geography, literature, urban planning, politics, arts, and cultural studies. The contributions to this volume discuss the notion of island-ness as a device triggering the imagination, triggering narratives and representations in different creative fields; they explore the interactions between legal, socio-political, and fictional approaches to remoteness and the ‘state of insularity,’ policy responses to both remoteness and boundaries on different scales, and the insular legal framing of geographical remoteness. The product of a cross-disciplinary exchange on islands, this edited volume will be of great interest to those working in the fields of Island Studies, as well as literary studies scholars, geographers, and legal scholars.