Nuove intersezioni: crimine e storia nella narrativa Italiana al cambio di millennio

My research investigates a recent tendency in Italian literature, characterized by elements of renewal within the novel-writing tradition and of discontinuity with postmodern culture. It proposes an interpretation of the genres of the historical novel and crime fiction in the last fifteen years, in order to underline the important role played by these types of narrative in revitalizing contemporary Italian literature. These modalities of writing are considered both individually and in their connections beyond a traditional notion of genre, emphasizing those characteristics which may be assumed as irreconcilable with a postmodern approach to fiction and those which, furthermore, seem to indicate attempts to take a new course. In particular, my study analyses the recent literary tendency to combine the elements of ‘crime’ and ‘history’ in order to represent political and social reality, and how the works examined relate to postmodern narrative. For this reason, I pay particular attention to the relationship between literature and the past and to the socio-political aspects connected with the praxis of narrating, offering an original interpretation of the way in which the authors studied engage with these characteristics.

Azione destabilizzante e impegno politico. Le figure femminili tra il giallo e il nero Italiani dal 1980 a oggi

My thesis analyses female figures in Italian crime fiction since 1980, from narratological, sociological and gender-studies perspectives. It considers the narrative structure of the giallo and the noir, taking into account the difficulties, particularly in Italy, of establishing what noir fiction is and if/how it is possible to frame it in a specific narrative scheme. This discourse connects to the extraordinary success of Italian giallo and noir fiction over the past fifteen-twenty years. In this scenario, I examine the place of female writers in relation to this phenomenon, especially since the 1980s: in terms of the level of visibility/acceptance of their work, in a narrative space traditionally considered as a male territory, and with regard to their writings, which introduce different narrative perspectives. Specifically, I consider selected texts by leading female Italian writers, in which female elements (writers/characters) become destabilizing factor both on the narrative level, by undermining the schemes of ‘formulaic’ fiction, and on the political one, through their implicit potential (as women) for disrupting the rigid models inherited from processes of social conditioning and from political structures. In terms of gender identities, such texts offer scope to question conventional social constructions of the subject: by empowering the female narrative voice and by embodying it in characters (investigators/killers) traditionally personified by male figures. These texts offer themselves as a critical space where, potentially, readers can rethink static gendered relationships and stereotypical symbolical categories.

Aesthetic campaigns and counter-campaigns. Jorge Luis Borges and a century of the Argentine detective story (1877-1977)

This cultural history of Argentine crime fiction involves a comprehensive analysis of the literary and critical traditions within the genre, paying particular attention to the series of ‘aesthetic campaigns’ waged by Jorge Luis Borges and others during the period between 1933 and 1977. The methodological approach described in the introductory chapter builds upon the critical insight that in Argentina, generic discourse has consistently been the domain, not only of literary critics in the traditional mould, but also of prominent writers of fiction and specialists from other disciplines, effectively transcending the traditional tripartite ‘division of labour’ between writers, critics and readers. Chapter One charts the early development of crime fiction, and contextualises the evolution of the classical and hardboiled variants that were to provide a durable conceptual framework for discourse in the Argentine context. Chapter Two examines a number of pioneering early works by Argentine authors, before analysing Borges’ multi-faceted aesthetic campaign on behalf of the ‘classical’ detective story. Chapter Three examines a transitional period for the Argentine crime genre, book-ended by the three Vea y Lea magazine-sponsored detective story competitions that acted as a vital stimulus to innovation among Argentine writers. It includes a substantial treatment of the work of Rodolfo Walsh, documenting his transition from crime writer and anthologist to pioneer of the non-fiction novel and investigative journalism traditions. Chapter Four examines the period in which the novela negra came to achieve dominance in Argentina, in particular the aesthetic counter-campaigns conducted by Ricardo Piglia and others on behalf of the hard-boiled variant. The study concludes with a detailed analysis of Pablo Leonardo’s La mala guita (1976), which is considered as a paradigmatic example of crime fiction in Argentina in this period. The final chapter presents conclusions and a summary of the dissertation, and recommendations for further research.

A post-structuralist analysis of Irish youth crime prevention policy with specific emphasis on the Garda youth diversion projects

Garda Youth Diversion Projects (GYDPs) have since their beginnings in the early 1990s gained an increasingly important role and now constitute a central feature of Irish youth justice provision. Managed by the Irish Youth Justice Service and implemented by the Gardai and a variety of youth work organisations as well as independent community organisations, GYDPs are located at the crossroads of welfarist and corporatist approaches to youth justice, combining diversionary and preventative aspects in their work. To date, these projects have been subjected to very little systematic analysis and they have thus largely escaped critical scrutiny. To address this gap, this thesis locates the analysis of GYDP policy and practice within a post-structuralist theoretical framework and deploys discourse analysis primarily based on the work of Michel Foucault. It makes visible the official youth crime prevention and GYDP policy discourses and identifies how official discourses relating to youth crime prevention, young people and their offending behaviour, are drawn upon, negotiated, rejected or re-contextualised by project workers and JLOs. It also lays bare how project workers and JLOs draw upon a variety of other discourses, resulting in multi-layered, complex and sometimes contradictory constructions of young people, their offending behaviour and corresponding interventions. At a time when the projects are undergoing significant changes in terms of their repositioning to operate as the support infrastructure underpinning the statutory Garda Youth Diversion Programme, the thesis traces the discursive shifts and the implications for practice that are occurring as the projects move away from a youth work orientation towards a youth justice orientation. A key contribution of this thesis is the insight it provides into how young people and their families are being constituted in individualising and sometimes pathologising ways in GYDP discourses and practices. It reveals the part played by the GYDP intervention in favouring individual and narrow familial causes of offending behaviour while broader societal contexts are sidelined. By explicating the very assumptions upon which contemporary youth crime prevention policy, as well as GYDP policy and practice are based, this thesis offers a counterpoint to the prevailing evidence-based agenda of much research in the field of Irish youth justice theory and youth studies more generally. Rather, it encourages the reader to take a step back and examine some of the most fundamental and unquestioned assumptions about the construction of young people, their offending behaviour and ways of addressing this, in contemporary Irish youth crime prevention policy and practice.

History, revolution and the British popular novel: historical fiction in the romantic age

“History, Revolution and the British Popular Novel” takes as its focus the significant role which historical fiction played within the French Revolution debate and its aftermath. Examining the complex intersection of the genre with the political and historical dialogue generated by the French Revolution crisis, the thesis contends that contemporary fascination with the historical episode of the Revolution, and the fundamental importance of history to the disputes which raged about questions of tradition and change, and the meaning of the British national past, led to the emergence of increasingly complex forms of fictional historical narrative during the “war of ideas.” Considering the varying ways in which novelists such as Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, Mary Robinson, Helen Craik, Clara Reeve, John Moore, Edward Sayer, Mary Charlton, Ann Thomas, George Walker and Jane West engaged with the historical contexts of the Revolution debate, my discussion juxtaposes the manner in which English Jacobin novelists inserted the radical critique of the Jacobin novel into the wider arena of history with anti-Jacobin deployments of the historical to combat the revolutionary threat and internal moves for socio-political restructuring. I argue that the use of imaginative historical narrative to contribute to the ongoing dialogue surrounding the Revolution, and offer political and historical guidance to readers, represented a significant element within the literature of the Revolution crisis. The thesis also identifies the diverse body of historical fiction which materialised amidst the Revolution controversy as a key context within which to understand the emergence of Scott’s national historical novel in 1814, and the broader field of historical fiction in the era of Waterloo. Tracing the continued engagement with revolutionary and political concerns evident in the early Waverley novels, Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), William Godwin’s Mandeville (1816), and Mary Shelley’s Valperga (1823), my discussion concludes by arguing that Godwin’s and Shelley’s extension of the mode of historical fiction initially envisioned by Godwin in the revolutionary decade, and their shared endeavour to retrieve the possibility enshrined within the republican past, appeared as a significant counter to the model of history and fiction developed by Walter Scott in the post-revolutionary epoch.

“Fiction makes a better job of the truth”: dialogism, oppositional consciousness and re-membering in the novels of Helena María Viramontes

This thesis comprises close textual analyses of Chicana author Helena María Viramontes' two published novels, Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Their Dogs Came With Them (2007). These analyses fall under three broad frameworks: space, time and body. Chapter One engages with the first of these frameworks, space, and explores concepts of cognitive mapping and heteroptopias. Chapter Two, which looks at time, employs theories of intertextuality and the palimpsest, while Chapter Three looks at the interrrelationship between mythology and images of the body in the texts. This study emerges five years after the publication of Viramontes' last novel, Their Dogs Came With Them, but offers fresh insight into the contribution of the author to both the Chicano literary tradition and also the U.S. canon through her critique of hegemonic power structures that suppress not only the voices of lower class ethnic citizens but also of ethnic writers. In particular, her work chastises the paucity of attention given to ethnic women writers in the U.S. This thesis reaffirms Viramontes' position as one of the most important writers living and writing in the U.S. today. It corroborates her work as a contestation against ethnic and gender suppression, and applauds the craftsmanship of her narrative style that delicately but decisively exposes the socio-political wrongs that occur in ocntemporary U.S. society.