Between

Editorial

2025-12-11T10:45:44+01:00

Editorial issue 30

The Post-Apocalyptic Imaginary in Contemporary Fiction

2025-12-11T10:44:02+01:00

The issue After the Catastrophe: Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Narratives explores post-apocalyptic, science-fictional, and eco-dystopian production from the past two decades, examining the representation of the ‘after-the-catastrophe’ world through the ways in which it interrogates and reconfigures the three fundamental coordinates of time, space, and subjectivity.

Citéville, Citéruine: Urban Spaces of Tomorrow and the Day after Tomorrow in contemporary Graphic Novels

2025-12-11T10:44:27+01:00

This study analyses the representation of dystopian and post-apocalyptic urban space in Citéville and Citéruine, a graphic novel diptych by Jérôme Dubois that was published simultaneously in 2020 by two different French publishing houses. Although the author denies any temporal sequence between the two works, it is inevitable to read the post-apocalyptic city, emptied and devoid of human presence, as the desolate and posthumous reflection of the dystopian city. The alienation of its inhabitants in the latter foreshadows its end. Adopting an ecocritical and narratological approach, this article aims to demonstrate the potential of visual storytelling to raise awareness of the climate crisis. It focuses in particular on three issues: alienating temporality; the narrative function of space; the compositional mode of doubling and subtraction. These characterise the representation of the city of tomorrow, which is drawing ever closer, and of the day after tomorrow, which functions as a spectre and as “shock therapy” on our present.

For a Narratological Approach to Space in Post-Apocalypctic Narrative: Ammaniti, Arpaia, Zanotti

2025-12-11T10:44:25+01:00

This article proposes a set of conceptual tools and strategic questions that can guide the narratological analysis of narrative space in post-apocalyptic narratives. While these concepts can be employed in other texts too, this particular genre has been chosen due to space’s privileged thematic role: the catastrophe that causes the end of the world as we know it either entails a radical transformation of the environment or brings about social crises that force individuals to rethink their relationship with their surroundings. The article explores the consequences of the thematic relevance of space for the formal strategies used to render it. Drawing on M.-L. Ryan’s model of narrative space, a comparative analysis of Bambini bonsai (Zanotti), Anna (Ammaniti), and Qualcosa, là fuori (Arpaia) serves to illuminate similarities and differences in how space is represented, and suggests how these formal features may prompt specific reading effects.

«Mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained». David Foster Wallace's approach to dystopia

2025-12-11T10:44:23+01:00

David Foster Wallace wrote two dystopian novels, both set in a near future and depicting the same sort of disastrous political landscapes. This study aims to compare the two works, identifying similarities in the characters and plot between The Broom of the System (1987) and Infinite Jest (1996).
Besides showing the systematic repetition of patterns in DFW’s fiction – which is in itself relevant, as these repeated creative choices often move against the canon of the most famous dystopian novels – this comparison will outline how Andrew Lang from The Broom and Don Gately from Infinite Jest occupy the same positions within their respective character systems and how the difference between the two (Lang does not have morals, whereas Gately does) causes the “narrative equations” of these partially symmetrical books to diverge towards two opposite endings, allowing the possibility of a positive resolution in Infinite Jest that DFW’s first dystopic take failed to find.

Calypsis. Submerged Worlds and Post-Apocalyptic Subjectivities in Contemporary Comics

2025-12-11T11:14:54+01:00

This paper examines contemporary post-apocalyptic comics centered on the aquatic element. It builds on three Italian graphic novels: La terra dei figli by Gipi (2016), Celestia by Manuele Fior (2019), and Troppo facile amarti in vacanza by Giacomo Bevilacqua (2021). It aims to investigate the theoretical, aesthetic, and symbolic role of water in the narrative articulation of the Anthropocene crisis in recent comic book production, beyond its literal diegetic functions. The analysis takes an interdisciplinary approach combining ecocriticism, visual semiotics, comics studies, and media theory. We introduce the theoretical category of ‘epicalypse’ to describe a mode in which the post-apocalyptic condition is inscribed within the present, haunting its imaginary with the idea that the catastrophic event has already occurred. Within this framework, water becomes a medial metaphor and a cultural grammar through which contemporary comics articulate life after the end – simultaneously evoking destruction and generation, concealment and revelation, the dissolution of entrenched institutions and the potential for posthuman subjectivities.

Architectures from Future Past. Glimpses of Utopia in Dystopian Italian Comics

2025-12-11T10:44:20+01:00

While science fiction traditionally serves as an imaginative laboratory for alternative futures, contemporary dystopian narratives paradoxically reveal cultural stagnation and inability to envision possibilities beyond existing paradigms. In comics, space assumes an inherent structural significance as it spatializes time, with settings evolving to central narrative elements throughout the medium’s history. This study examines architectural representations in three graphic narratives — Fior’s Celestia, Bertolini’s Da sola, and Pinto’s Lo schermo bianco — where space assumes structural significance beyond setting. Through cognitive estrangement, these works deploy unrealized architectural projects as what Fisher terms architectures of anachronism that create temporal short-circuits. Our analysis employs interdisciplinary methodologies combining philosophy and ecocriticism to examine how these architectures function as heterotopic sites. These works articulate a paradoxical nostalgia for denied futures, creating fragile utopian spaces within dystopian frameworks where characters access modes of posthuman subjectivity that resist the endoapocalyptic condition of our reality.

Hope Deferred: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction as Anti-Utopia

2025-12-11T10:44:19+01:00

This paper explores contemporary post-apocalyptic narratives as cultural metaphors reflecting anxieties about societal collapse, environmental crisis, and the future. It argues these narratives often function as anti-utopias, depicting inevitable catastrophe and fostering fatalism rather than radical alternatives. Using a materialist and sociological approach, the study examines the epistemic role of post-apocalyptic literature, analyzing how these works bridge literary form and socio-political context. Case studies from Italian and international novels reveal a pattern grounded in realism and extra-literary references, warning of ecological and technological dangers but seldom imagining paths to transformation. This tension underscores a cultural crisis of imagination, where the apocalypse is both metaphor and reality, challenging hopeful futures in literature and society. Yet, feminist utopias present alternative visions, imagining new societies beyond collapse and inspiring change.

An Econarratological Analysis of Qualcosa, là fuori by Bruno Arpaia

2025-12-11T10:44:17+01:00

This essay offers an econarratological analysis of the climate fiction novel Qualcosa, là fuori (2016). Set in a near future marked by irreversible climate change, the novel depicts a forced migration of Mediterranean populations to Northern Europe to escape desertification and ecological collapse. The novel is narrated through the consciousness of a former university professor.
The econarratological approach highlights how Qualcosa, là fuori functions as both a cognitive and affective device, capable of shaping an embodied ecological awareness by linking narrative imagination to the crisis of the Anthropocene. The novel’s anti-heroic framework deconstructs the conventional tropes of a salvific protagonist and the notion of a definitive resolution of the crisis. It is characterized by a focus on the memorial evocation of what has been lost. Econarratology offers a theoretical framework for analizyng how literary narratives represent, interpret, and transform contemporary ecological experience.

From Cli-fi to Fairy-tale: Metamorphic Women Confronting Ecological Collapse in Contemporary Italian Literature

2025-12-11T10:44:16+01:00

In the face of the ecological crisis and the alleged inability of contemporary literature to represent the major disruptions of the Anthropocene, science fiction, in its cli-fi (climate fiction) variant, is often regarded as the narrative genre best suited for addressing the challenges of climate change. This article proposes a shift in perspective by exploring the narrative potential of the fairy tale in contemporary Italian literature. Through the works of Laura Pugno (Sirene, Melusina) and Laura Pariani (La valle delle donne lupo, Apriti, mare!), the text highlights the central role of metamorphic female figures (sirens, she-wolves, and melusines) in shaping an ecological imaginary that can destabilize modern dichotomies between human and non-human, nature and culture. This imagery also redefines our relationship with the living and non-living worlds.

Material Catastrophes, Cultural Catastrophes: The Theme of Presence in the Basilicata of Missitalia

2025-12-11T10:44:13+01:00

This paper analyses the peculiar way in which Claudia Durastanti narrates the theme of catastrophe in her recent novel Missitalia (2024), starting from a reclamation of the concept of presence, grounded in a nature-cultural conceptual broadening inspired by Donna Haraway’s speculative, feminist, and ecological thought. Adopting a materialist ecocritical methodology, the argument unfolds through the triple meaning of the English word “miss”, which shapes both the novel’s title and its narrative structure, touching themes such as colonialism, Italian oil history, ecology, and feminism. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates how, by operating on both formal and thematic levels, Durastanti constructs a rebellious and sabotaging narrative mechanism that redefines how catastrophe is addressed in literature.

Toward a Multispecies Radical Care. Posthuman kinships in Clelia Farris’s I vegumani and Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi

2025-12-11T10:44:12+01:00

This article presents a comparative analysis of the solarpunk novel I vegumani by Clelia Farris and the short film Pumzi by Wanuri Kahiu, through the theoretical-methodological perspective of posthuman feminism. By incorporating elements of utopia and dystopia, both works focus on the interconnectedness of the human and the (plant) non-human as a potential path to regeneration in a post-catastrophic scenario. Drawing on the theories of Donna Haraway, Stacy Alaimo, and Angela Balzano, among others, the article examines these case studies through the thematic trajectories of posthuman hybridizations, plant agency, and multispecies radical care, to explore potential modes of existence despite — and beyond — the Anthropocene.

Gloomy Islands and Mass extinctions. The playful disasters of Éric Chevillard

2025-12-11T10:44:10+01:00

After pointing out the theoretical difference between apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels, the article looks at 21st-century French literature that has tackled the theme of a post-disaster world. The analysis identifies the most compelling examples of this dystopian trend in the works of experimental authors who, over recent decades, have cultivated an ironic and playful approach to post-apocalyptic narrative. To illustrate the concept of “playful catastrophe”, a framework particularly apt for these works, the article then focuses on Éric Chevillard’s novel Sans l’orang-Outan (2007) and Choir (2010), a bizarre post-apocalyptic diptych.

Finimondi. Multispecies Smarginature

2025-12-11T10:44:08+01:00

The article investigates end-of-world experiences arising from ecological crisis, reframing them through fractures and dissolutions – smarginature – as multispecies phenomena rooted in everyday life. The study asks how the discursive components of modern and contemporary, post- or anti-apocalyptic media milieus can echo the energies of non-human actants long silenced and concealed by eco-capitalist hyperrealism, through the lens of diffractive perceptibilities. Focusing on the 2019 landslide in San Martino Valle Caudina (AV), which resurfaced the buried Caudino torrent, we explore how narrative strategies contribute to shifting the storytelling’s focus of such Italian inland territory from human eschatology to elemental, animal, and machinic agencies. The dynamics of emersion and submersion in the narrative reconstructions of these increasingly frequent climate events resonate with lagoon imaginaries – from J.G. Ballard’s drowned, feverish cities to Pugno’s hybrid, aquatic worlds – as finimondi, revelatory and relational thresholds where connections capable of transforming ending worlds can occur.

Reclaiming Rage as Utopian Force: Exploring a Latin American Ecodystopia

2025-12-11T11:15:12+01:00

Long dismissed as irrational and destructive, rage emerges in the context of contemporary social and environmental crises as a vehicle of resistance and a catalyst for transformation. This paper explores the role of rage as a collective utopian force in Michel Nieva’s La infancia del mundo (2023), focusing on the character of the dengue child. Initially marginalized, silenced, and reduced to a discarded being, the dengue child represents a figure of social exclusion and systemic violence. The narrative traces the character’s journey from passivity and vulnerability to self-determined agency and a radical redefinition of their identity. In contrast to the dominant forms of violence that uphold power structures, the dengue child’s rage manifests as a counter-hegemonic force — an anarchic and collective rebellion against established norms. This paper emphasizes that, far from being destructive, rage holds the potential to reconfigure societal and environmental relations by offering a critique of the technocapitalist order and opening the door to alternative political imaginaries.

Apocalyptic Immanence and Anthropocene Time

2025-12-11T10:44:05+01:00

This article explores the cultural influence of Frank Kermode’s description of apocalyptic immanence in The Sense of an Ending (1966). I focus on Kermode’s claim that human subject formation and human conceptions of cosmic time are mutually constituted through expectations of the End. I claim that a version of this dynamic is at play in the Anthropocene debate, where attention to planetary-scale agency has reoriented social routines and cognitive and affective configurations, and has extended the temporal dimensionality of epistemic practices. I pay specific attention to the positions of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) and to the work of historians Dipesh Chakrabarty and François Hartog. I suggest that Kermodian apocalyptic immanence can be effective where it serves to achieve political momentum. Also, at the level of conceptual analysis, it can help us make sense of the juxtaposition of geological, historical, and autobiographical timescales in Anthropocene thinking. However, its humanistic emphasis on the transhistorical self-sameness of the autological subject makes it a problematic conceptual tool.

An Island in the Dead Sea of Adults. Bambini bonsai by Zanotti

2025-12-11T10:44:04+01:00

This study analyzes the apocalyptic scenario of Bambini bonsai (2010). The aim is to demonstrate how Zanotti uses the coordinates of catastrophic narrative to set in motion the adventures of his Bildungsroman. Through a comparison with Pugno’s nearly contemporary Sirene (2007), this essay investigates an original application of Calvino’s lesson on the use of the child character as an allegory of a forward leap. Furthermore, drawing on recent contributions by Giglioli, Jedlowski, and Micali, Zanotti’s novel will be framed as a contemporary conte sociologique, one that outlines the recipe for surviving «not so much “at” the End as “in” the End»: specifically, that of the post-adolescent no future.

«L’Inspiegabile si è inaugurato per opera mia». Suicide and Apocalypse in Guido Morselli’s Dissipatio H. G.

2025-12-11T10:44:29+01:00

This article examines Guido Morselli’s Dissipatio H. G., widely regarded as one of the earliest and most significant examples of the Italian post-apocalyptic novel. The analysis focuses on the protagonist’s attempted suicide and demonstrates how suicide is presented in a unique manner throughout the novel.

The study argues that the theme of suicide is central to the post-apocalyptic scenario of the novel: the mysterious disappearance of humankind happens when the protagonist attempts, and fails, his suicide. Consequently, this theme emerges as central to the novel’s overall structure. By adopting this interpretive lens, the essay finally offers a deeper insight into Morselli’s text and contributes to a better understanding of his view of the end of the world. Furthermore, it demonstrates how this specific characterization of suicide can be regarded as an example of the subversive power of literature.

Life in times of climate crisis: novel, Anthropocene and the forms of realism

2025-12-11T10:44:00+01:00

In this issue of Between, which focuses on post-apocalyptic narratives, the In Discussion column is dedicated to several recent novels that place images of disaster in the foreground or background, but always in relation to the realistic portrayal of the daily lives of individuals and communities. The works in question are The Deluge by Stephen Markley (2022), The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (2023) and What We Can Now by Ian McEwan (2025).

To bring into the World, at the End of the World. Notes on Eco-anxiety and Parenthood in Contemporary Narratives

2025-12-11T10:43:59+01:00

The ‘sense of ending’, that every generation has always had to face, has accelerated in recent decades, generating widespread concern for the future of a planet that appears increasingly fragile and vulnerable. Awareness of the short- and long-term consequences of change generates forms of eco-anxiety that are also reflected in individual choices, such as those relating to parenthood. Starting from these premises, the article reflects on the ways in which the issue presents itself in all its complexity and urgency in some hyper-contemporary novels and graphic novels, such as Avant l’oubli (2021) by Lisa Blumen, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) by Sally Rooney, and The Bee Sting (2023) by Paul Murray, which question our way of living and surviving together.

“Our grandchildren will look at Chevron and Exxon ads the way you and I look at swastikas”. Stephen Markley’s The Deluge between novel and prophecy

2025-12-12T16:10:50+01:00

Alternating between narrative and essayistic reflection, the article examines the interpenetration of secularised prophecy and realist fiction in Stephen Markley’s The Deluge (2022). When compared with other ways of narrating the climate crisis, Markley’s novel seems to stand out for its search for a virtuous compromise between the desire to speak to many people and the need to defend the complexity of literature; a balance evident in the paradox of a novel that, on the one hand, allows itself to be reduced to a few edifying slogans, but on the other hand tells tragic stories where no one is right and everyone fails. At the same time, The Deluge is a highly experimental work that would be impossible to take as a model: what, then, is its relevance today?

Inside the end. Distance and knowledge in Ian McEwan and Tiago Rodrigues

2025-12-11T10:43:56+01:00

The essay analyzes the play La Distance by Tiago Rodrigues and the novel What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (both 2025), set in dystopian future scenarios of a post-apocalyptic nature. They converge in reflecting on memory, oblivion and knowledge, whitin a socio-cultural context characterized by disintegration. Rodrigues uses theatrical language to represent intergenerational and interplanetary distance, through the figure of a father who remained on Earth and a daughter who emigrated to Mars; McEwan instead narrates the search for a lost poem in an England devastated by the consequences of climate collapse. Both authors stage the intrinsic fragility of knowledge and its function of resistance, proposing a post-catastrophic humanism focused on the care, memory and survival of language. The works suggest that knowledge should not be conceived as a dominion, but as a gesture of accompaniment and witness, a means of remaining in the world, even in the face of the imminence of the end.

Emergency Signals. On Two Recent Books

2025-12-11T10:43:54+01:00

As we know, the sense of emergency that defines our present moment does not only stem from the environmental crisis. Its political and social implications are explored, through notably different perspectives, in two of the most compelling books published this year: Senza riparo. Sei tentativi di leggere il presente by Guido Mazzoni (Bari–Rome: Laterza); and La fuga immobile. Lo strano caso della Generazione Z by Walter Siti (Milan: Silvio Berlusconi Editore). We present two articles on these books and on the issues they raise: the first by Gianluigi Simonetti, one of the most incisive voices in Italy’s current intellectual scene; the second by the editor.

Dazzling Black: Antonio Biasiucci’s Photography of Catastrophe

2025-12-11T10:43:48+01:00

This interview with photographer Antonio Biasiucci explores his lifelong engagement with the primordial forces, rituals, and landscapes of Southern Italy, where catastrophe is not an event but an existential condition. Through autobiographical reflections, Biasiucci recounts how photography emerged as a transformative “gift,” allowing him to translate personal loss, volcanic wilderness, and ancestral materials into a secular form of sacredness. The conversation examines his relationships with masters such as Antonio Neiwiller, his theatrical method of continual self-revision, and his approach to darkness as both identity and language. Biasiucci reveals how error, metamorphosis, and narrative imagination shape his visual “scenarios,” where images cross temporalities and shift scale, generating post-apocalyptic worlds suspended between memory and renewal. His practice ultimately frames photography as an act of excavation, a way of giving meaning to death, matter, and the fragile architectures of existence.

Olivia Fialho, Transformative Reading

2025-12-11T10:43:53+01:00

Review of Olivia Fialho's Transformative Reading.

Katia Massara, Virgilio va in montagna. I licei classici nella Resistenza

2025-12-10T16:43:02+01:00

Review of Katia Massara's Virgilio va in montagna. I licei classici nella Resistenza.

Cristiano Anelli, A scuola di Novecento. La letteratura italiana del XX secolo nella manualistica scolastica (1923-2023)

2025-12-11T10:43:51+01:00

Review of Cristiano Anelli's A scuola di Novecento. La letteratura italiana del XX secolo nella manualistica scolastica (1923-2023).

Clelia Martignoni, Complessità Gadda. Complessità Novecento

2025-12-11T10:43:34+01:00

Review of Clelia Martignoni's Complessità Gadda. Complessità Novecento.

Micaela Riboldi, Distruggi tutto. La pulsione di morte al femminile da Freud a Lacan

2025-12-11T10:43:33+01:00

Review of Micaela Riboldi's Distruggi tutto. La pulsione di morte al femminile da Freud a Lacan.

Maria Rizzarelli – Beatrice Seligardi (eds.), Talenti doppi. Vocazioni plurime nella letteratura contemporanea

2025-12-11T10:43:47+01:00

Review of Talenti doppi. Vocazioni plurime nella letteratura contemporanea edited by Maria Rizzarelli e Beatrice Seligardi.

Alberto L. Siani, Landscape Aesthetics: Toward an Engaged Ecology

2025-12-12T11:29:53+01:00

Alberto L. Siani, Landscape Aesthetics: Toward an Engaged Ecology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024)

Michele Cometa, Paleoestetica. Alle origini della cultura visuale

2025-12-11T10:43:44+01:00

Review of Michele Cometa's Paleoestetica. Alle origini della cultura visuale.

Ferdinando Amigoni, Altezza degli occhi. Corpi, lampi e spettri nel Photomatic

2025-12-11T10:43:42+01:00

Review of Ferdinando Amigoni's Altezza degli occhi. Corpi, lampi e spettri nel Photomatic.

Elena Porciani, Non solo canzonette. La popular music nella narrativa contemporanea

2025-12-11T10:43:41+01:00

Review of Elena Porciani's Non solo canzonette. La popular music nella narrativa contemporanea.

Elena Porciani - Francesco Sielo (eds.) Attraversare il Margine. Su Smarginature e Marginalità del Presente

2025-12-11T10:43:50+01:00

Review of Attraversare il margine. Su smarginature e marginalità del presente edited by Elena Porciani e Francesco Sielo.

Riccardo Castellana (ed.), Biografia e autobiografia. Scritture di vita dall’antichità a oggi

2025-12-11T10:43:39+01:00

Review of Biografia e autobiografia. Scritture di vita dall'antichità a oggi, edited by Riccardo Castellana.

Flora de Giovanni, Il gruppo di Bloomsbury. Vita, morte e resurrezione di un fenomeno culturale

2025-12-11T10:43:37+01:00

Review of Flora de Giovanni's Il gruppo di Bloomsbury. Vita, morte e resurrezione di un fenomeno culturale.

Novella Primo, Nadia Rosso, Dario Stazzone (eds.), Metamorfosi in dialogo. Studi in onore di Rosalba Galvagno

2025-12-11T10:43:36+01:00

Review of Metamorfosi in dialogo. Studi in onore di Rosalba Galvagno edited by Novella Primo, Nadia Rosso, Dario Stazzone.