Thinking Out of the Box in Literary and Cultural Studies

Getting out of the box is a way for innovative writers across the ages not simply to jettison their given cultural and national tools but to combine them inventively. The present book contains a revised selection of the literature and cultural studies papers given at the XXIX AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica) Conference, which was held at the University of Padova in September 2019. It aims to detect the many ways in which cultures negotiate their differences and eventually revise their boundaries: epistemological shifts are shown thanks to the changes in literary tastes and in conventions. In/out, the centre of the Empire and its (ex-)colonies, whiteness and blackness, man and woman, are among the main twin boxes that get revised and extrapolated. Not one single box is left untouched: fixed notions of genre, and of gender as well, are here discussed with a keen attention to the many moments where the writers’ ambivalence causes a shift in literary creation.