Cfp Between XV.30 (November 2025). “After the Catastrophe. Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Narratives”

2024-10-21

Editors:
Elisabetta Abignente (University of Naples Federico II), Claudia Cao (University of Cagliari), and Claudia Cerulo (University of Naples Federico II)

Submission Deadline: May 1^st, 2025.
Publication Date: November 30^th, 2025

Since ancient times, narratives about the end of the world have given voice to the anxieties and crises of the societies that have produced them. The forms of the apocalypse are thematically and diachronically broad and diverse (Pharr, Clark and Firestone 2016; De Cristofaro 2020). Already at the dawn of the nineteenth century, in her The Last Man (1826), Mary Shelley, the brilliant inventor of this genre, reflected on the condition of the single survivor of a lethal virus. While, for obvious chronological reasons, the anguish for a wasted environment is still absent in Shelley, many twentieth-century narratives reflect on the annihilating potential of humans’ actions on ecosystems. Think of Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901) and London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912) which, almost on the verge of the First World War, stage disasters and a frightening social regression caused respectively by a lethal gas leak from the poles and a raging pandemic. In the second half of the twentieth century, compounded by dramatic historical events, there was a proliferation of works envisioning post-catastrophe societal forms. Works by authors such as James Ballard, Stephen King, or Cormac McCarthy provide a critical perspective on the human condition facing diseases, viruses, and disasters. Although the “sense of an ending” (Kermode 2004) has characterised previous epochs, since the beginning of the new century, reality and imagination have gradually come to coincide, and the concept of catastrophe has shifted from the horizon of the probable to that of the real. In this context, there has been an attempt by the humanities to analyse the increasingly tangible anthropogenic environmental changes. In recent decades, paying attention to the various social and economic categories shaping our present and seeking to examine the anthropological and aesthetic implications of an apocalyptic imaginary, philosophical reflection, literature, and the arts have provided a space for the exploration of anxieties that find no expression elsewhere (Orlando 1973). Living in an era of precariousness and anxiety, the idea of catastrophe, which is central to a rich body of post-apocalyptic, science fiction, and eco-dystopian narratives, intersects with environmental social and political reflections, becoming “a way of visualising, directly and perceptibly, the dangers of our present” (Malvestio 2021: 18). While for a long time, the post-apocalyptic genre was exclusively linked to the Anglo-American tradition, since the 2000s, interest has grown in Italy for the study of the relationship between literature and ecology, with some fundamental critical contributions (Scaffai 2017; Benedetti 2021). Particularly important are the reflections on the relationship between some literary genres and the need to think about climate change to conceive alternative scenarios (Comberiati 2021). From the perspective of literary production, since the early 2010s, there has been a proliferation of works linking apocalyptic scenarios and climate change. Consider novels such as Sirene (2007) by Pugno, Bambini bonsai (2010) by Zanotti, L’uomo verticale (2010) by Longo, Anna (2015) by Ammaniti, Qualcosa là fuori (2016) by Arpaia, La festa nera (2018) by Bellocchio, La galassia dei dementi (2018) by Cavazzoni, L’isola delle madri by Cutrufelli (2020), and Apriti, mare! (2021) by Pariani; not to mention graphic novels such as La terra dei figli (2016) by Gipi, Geist Maschine by Ceccotti, Mother (2020) by Capigatti and Troppo facile amarti in vacanza (2021) by Bevilacqua. Faced with an increasingly unsettling horizon of events, a growing number of narratives pose a dramatic question: what would happen if a sudden global catastrophe were to wipe out human, animal, and plant life on Earth (Bellamy 2021)? The climate threat has led to a surge in representations of a devastated world, where survivors find themselves grappling with twisted forms of life in a distorted landscape. The ruins, objects stripped of their original function, and the relationship that surviving subjects establish with them thus become a repository of possibilities for imagining a post-catastrophe existence with emancipatory and creative potential.

The issue of Between aims providing an in-depth investigation of Italian intermedial production on this theme. The goal is twofold: on one hand, to valorise the content, forms, and specificities of Italian post-apocalyptic production from a comparative and intermedial perspective; on the other hand, to place it both within the context of contemporary European literature and the long Italian literary tradition, thereby engaging in an original manner with national and international critical discourse. We welcome contributions discussing the social and ecological implications of apocalyptic representations as well as the reception and editorial policies that favour this type of narrative. Submissions addressing the topic are welcome from both theoretical perspectives and through the analysis of one or more case studies from a comparative or inter-artes perspective.
Specifically, we encourage proposals related (but not limited) to:

Genres and motifs of catastrophe (science fiction, dystopia, utopia, post-apocalyptic)

Cultural imaginaries and narratives (literature, cinema, television series, comics, visual arts, photography)
Spaces and environments of the post-apocalyptic (landscapes, ruins, objects)
Embodiment experiences (human relationships, survival, childhood)
Gender, decolonial, and antispeciesist perspectives (ecofeminism, queer, animality, monstrosity)

This issue is edited by Elisabetta Abignente (elisabetta.abignente@unina.it), Claudia Cao (claudia.cao@unica.it) and Claudia Cerulo (claudia.cerulo@unina.it).

Authors are invited to consult the summary bibliography at the end of this call for papers. In case of any doubts and/or further information, please email the editors.

Articles ready for publication (no longer than 40,000 characters, including spaces, paginated on the provided Template, along with a title, an abstract, and metadata in English) must be sent to the journal by May 1^st, 2025, following the instructions available on the Submissions page of Between’s website. Accepted articles will be published on November 30^th, 2025.

Submissions are accepted in Italian, English, and French; bilingual submissions will also be accepted. Submissions in a language other than Italian and bilingual submissions (with one language being English or French) are appreciated and encouraged, especially for papers relating to foreign authors.

Essential bibliography:

Barr, Marleen S., Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1992.
Bellamy, Brent Ryan, Remainders of the American Century. Post-Apocalyptic Novels in the Age of US Decline, Middletown CT, Wesleyan University Press, 2021.
Benedetti, Carla, La letteratura ci salverà dall’estinzione, Torino, Einaudi, 2021.
Bladow, Kyle; Ladino, Jennifer, Affective Ecocriticism. Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2018.
Brioni, Simone; Comberiati, Daniele, Ideologia e rappresentazione. Percorsi attraverso la fantascienza italiana, Milano-Udine, Mimesis, 2020.
Brioni, Simone; Comberiati, Daniele, Italian Science Fiction. The Other in Literature and Film, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Comberiati, Daniele, Il mondo che verrà. Cinque ipotesi di ricostruzione dell’umanità nelle narrazioni distopiche, Milano, Mimesis, 2021.
Comberiati, Daniele; Somigli, Luca, «La fantascienza nelle narrazioni italiane ipercontemporanee», Narrativa, 43, 2021, pp. 1-11.
Curti Lidia (a cura di), Femminismi futuri, Roma, Iacobelli, 2021.
De Cristofaro, Diletta, The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel, London, Bloomsbury, 2020.
De Martino, Ernesto, La fine del mondo. Contributo all’analisi delle apocalissi culturali, Torino, Einaudi, 1977.
Fragnito, Maddalena; Tola, Miriam, Ecologie della cura. Prospettive transfemministe, Napoli, Orthotes, 2021.
Gallo, Domenico, «Fantascienza Outside the Ghetto: The Science-Fictional Writings of Italian Mainstream Authors», Science Fiction Studies, vol. 42, n. 2, 2015, pp. 251-273.
Giuliani, Gaia, Zombie, alieni e mutanti. Le paure dall’11 settembre a oggi, Milano, Mondadori, 2015.
Hicks, Heather, The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century, New York, Palgrave McMillan, 2016.
Iannuzzi, Giulia, Distopie, viaggi spaziali, allucinazioni. Fantascienza italiana contemporanea, Milano, Mimesis, 2015.
Iovino, Serenella, Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, Liberation, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
Lino, Mirko, L’apocalisse postmoderna tra letteratura e cinema. Catastrofi, oggetti, metropoli, corpi, Firenze, Le Lettere, 2014.
Malvestio, Marco, Raccontare la fine del mondo. Fantascienza e Antropocene, Milano, Nottetempo, 2021.
McNeil, John; Engelke, Peter, La Grande accelerazione. Una storia ambientale dell’Antropocene dopo il 1945, Torino, Einaudi, 2018.
Micali, Simona, Towards a Posthuman Imagination in Literature and Media, Berlin, Peter Lang, 2019.
Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press, 2013.
Mussgnug, Florian, «Finire il mondo. Per un’analisi del romanzo apocalittico italiano degli anni settanta», Contemporanea, n. 1, 2003, pp. 19-32.
Muzzioli, Francesco, Scritture della catastrofe. Istruzioni e ragguagli per un viaggio nelle distopie, Milano, Meltemi, 2021.
Orlando, Francesco, Gli oggetti desueti nelle immagini della letteratura, Torino, Einaudi, 2015.
Orlando, Francesco, Per una teoria freudiana della letteratura, Torino, Einaudi, 1973.
Proietti, Salvatore, «The Field of Italian Science Fiction», Science Fiction Studies, vol. 42, n. 2, 2015, pp. 217-231.
Scaffai, Niccolò, Letteratura e ecologia. Forme e temi di una relazione narrativa, Roma, Carocci, 2017.
Stock, Adam, Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought. Narratives of World Politics, New York, Routledge, 2018.
Vakoch, Douglas; Mickey, Sam, Literature and Ecofeminism, Oxon, Routledge, 2018.
Watkins, Susan, Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.