Anatomy of the “Bruce”. Truth and Fiction in Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia

  • Luigi Marfè Università di Padova
Keywords: Chatwin, Patagonia, Non-fiction Narrative, Travel, Chatwinesque

Abstract

Taking into account In Patagonia (1977) and the critical debate around it, this paper analyses how Bruce Chatwin changed the literary representation of places, undermining the traditional dichotomy between “truth” and “fiction”, and why the poetics of “Chatwinesque”—a term coined by his editor Susannah Clapp—became paradigmatic for contemporary non-fiction narrative.

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Author Biography

Luigi Marfè, Università di Padova
Luigi Marfè is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Padova. His research interests include travel writing, visual culture and translation studies. He is the author of three monographs: Oltre la fine dei viaggi (Olschki 2009), Introduzione alle teorie narrative (ArchetipoLibri 2011), «In English Clothes». La novella italiana in Inghilterra: politica e poetica della traduzione (Accademia UP 2015). He also wrote essays for many international journals (Compar(a)ison, Arcadia, Studies in Travel Writing, Hybris) and translated books into Italian from English (W. Shakespeare, Tito Andronico, Bompiani 2014), French (N. Bouvier, Il doppio sguardo, ETS 2012) and Spanish (A. Giménez Hutton, Chatwin in Patagonia, Nutrimenti 2015). He is the journal manager of the international, peer-reviewed academic journal Cosmo: Comparative Studies in Modernism (ISSN: 2281-6658).

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Published
2019-12-01
How to Cite
Marfè, L. (2019). Anatomy of the “Bruce”. Truth and Fiction in Bruce Chatwin’s <i>In Patagonia</i&gt;. Between, 9(18). https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/3753