The book takes its lead from academic Annamaria Pagliaro’s experience straddling Australia and Italy over a thirty-year period. As both former colleagues and collaborators of Pagliaro, we editors intend to open a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the international research landscape in the fields of Italian and Anglophone studies, starting from Pagliaro’s own contribution to the creation of relations between the two cultures in the period that saw her work transnationally as Director of the Monash University Prato Centre (2005-2008).

This collection of thirteen essays brings together Italian and American scholars to present a cooperative analysis of the Italian short story, beginning in the fourteenth century with Giovanni Boccaccio and arriving at the twentieth century with Alberto Moravia and Anna Maria Ortese. Throughout the book, the contributors carefully and intentionally unpack and explain the development of the short story genre and demonstrate the breadth of themes – cultural, historical and linguistic – detailed in these narratives. Dedicated to a genre “devoted to lightness and flexibility, as well as quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity,” this collection paints a careful and exacting picture of an important part of both Italian and literary history.

L'analisi condotta nel presente saggio (di tipo essenzialmente semasiologico) ha cercato di porre in evidenza come il testo vada ad inserirsi all'interno di un pi� generale interesse verso le vicende degli Ugonotti francesi, questi ultimi considerati rappresentativi - "ante litteram" - di quegli ideali di uguaglianza e di libert� che poi sarebbero stati anche il motore di certa parte democratica dell'intellettualit� risorgimentale italiana. Quella dei democratici, che dovettero soccombere di fronte alle istanze moderate di tipo cavouriano, fu una fazione sicuramente perdente, ma di certo non priva di spessore culturale e di impatto sociale, almeno a giudicare dalla pletora di drammi e di tragedie che seppe produrre a testimonianza dei propri ideali. Tale analisi � preceduta dalla disamina di alcuni drammi che presentarono al pubblico tematiche similari, per tentare di individuare una radice comune a cui anche l'ultimo autore esaminato, Gaetano Gattinelli, avrebbe poi fatto riferimento.

"Contemporary fantastic fiction, particularly that written by women, often challenges traditional literary practice. At the same time the predominantly male-authored canon of fantastic literature offers a problematic range of gender stereotypes for female authors to 're-write'. Fantastic tropes, of space in particular, enable three important contemporary Italian female writers (Paola Capriolo, b. 1962; Francesca Duranti, b. 1935 and Rossana Ombres, b. 1931) to encounter and counter anxieties about writing from the female subject. All three writers begin by exploring the hermetic, fantastic space of enclosure with a critical, or troubled, eye, but eventually opt for wider national, and often international spaces, in which only a 'fantastic trace' remains. This shift mirrors their own increasingly confident distance from male-authored literary models and demonstrates the creative input that these writers bring to the literary canon, by redefining its generic boundaries."