Stefano Serafini – författare

Re-Reading Golden Age Crime Writing: Time, Space, and Place intervenes in debates on crime literature by offering the first sustained analysis of British and American Golden Age fiction, broadly spanning the 1910s to the 1950s, through the interrelated yet analytically distinct frameworks of time, space, and place. It shows how each dimension shapes both the genre and individual texts, and how their interactions generate specific narrative, thematic, and ideological effects. Building on recent scholarship that understands crime fiction as mobile, composite, and open to continual reinterpretation, the volume foregrounds the thematic richness, theoretical sophistication, and experimental energies of Golden Age writing. It proposes a coherent critical framework and flexible set of tools for rethinking the genre. Drawing on paradigms such as Bakhtin’s chronotope, islandness, heterotopia, human geography, hauntology, psychogeography, and spatial discourse analysis, the contributors demonstrate how time, space, and place structure narrative possibility, organise perception, and mediate questions of crime, knowledge, justice, and power.Combining diverse theoretical paradigms, the book shows how these dimensions shape narrative possibility and mediate questions of crime, knowledge, justice, and power, reconceptualising the genre’s formal and ideological complexity.

The first critical study that theorises the Italian Gothic and examines its main forms and manifestations across arts, media, and disciplines. Offers a new account of the historical developments of Gothic narratives in the Italian context from the second half of the eighteenth century to the present dayExplores how, and with what implications, the Gothic has infiltrated a variety of media, including poetry, periodicals and magazines, cinema, comics, and musicExamines some of the major themes of the Italian Gothic, such as the Gothic body, the female Gothic, Gothic criminology, and folk horror and the ecogothicThis companion constitutes the first, systematic theorisation of the Italian Gothic. Through an interdisciplinary, trans-medial approach that encompasses prose fiction, poetry, journalism, film, music, and comics, it explores the varied and complex metamorphoses of the Gothic in Italy from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Although the last thirty years have seen a burgeoning in the academic study of the Gothic at college and university levels and in related publications, scholars have long struggled to even acknowledge the very existence of this mode in the Italian context. This companion does not only fill in a historical and critical gap in the scholarship, but it also contributes to revitalising the field of Gothic Studies, opening new channels of communication, and paving the way to the exploration of the fruitful interchanges between Italian and other European and American configurations of the Gothic.

This companion constitutes the first, systematic theorisation of the Italian Gothic. Through an interdisciplinary, trans-medial approach that encompasses prose fiction, poetry, journalism, film, music, and comics, it explores the varied and complex metamorphoses of the Gothic in Italy from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Although the last thirty years have seen a burgeoning in the academic study of the Gothic at college and university levels and in related publications, scholars have long struggled to even acknowledge the very existence of this mode in the Italian context. This companion does not only fill in a historical and critical gap in the scholarship, but it also contributes to revitalising the field of Gothic Studies, opening new channels of communication, and paving the way to the exploration of the fruitful interchanges between Italian and other European and American configurations of the Gothic.

The Gothic, proliferating across different literary, socio-cultural, and scientific spaces, permeated and influenced the project of Italian nation-building, casting a dark and pervasive shadow on Italian history. Gothic Italy explores the nuances, contradictions, and implications of the conflict between what the Gothic embodies in post-unification Italy and the values that a supposedly secular, modern country tries to uphold and promote.The book analyses a variety of literary works concerned with crime that tapped into fears relating to contagion, race, and class fluidity; deviant minds and abnormal sexuality; female transgression; male performativity; and the instability of the new body politic. By tracing how writers, scientists, and thinkers engaged with these issues, Gothic Italy unveils the mutual network of exchanges that informed national discourses about crime. Stefano Serafini brings attention to a historical moment that was crucial to the development of modern attitudes towards normality and deviance, which continue to circulate widely and still resonate disturbingly in contemporary society.