The Poetics of the Margins: Mapping Europe from the Interstices

This study is about identity and its relationship with the place one lives in, or one wants to escape from, or return to. It is about the formation and shaping of identity of what is termed ‘marginal’ in relation to a culturally constructed centre, be it the large city or the more recently constructed Europe, both in geographical and/or literary terms. Several are the vectors of identity that will be taken into consideration in this volume of collected essays: nomadism; travel and circular travel; escape and return journeys; migration, memory and visual cultures; marginal as opposed to supposedly central landscapes, languages, literatures and literary voices. The Poetics of the Margins. Mapping Europe from the Intersctices takes into consideration a number of Europen voices both literary and cinematic. The focus starts from an apparent geographical European centre, and yet marginal Italy, taking into focus several major and minor voices: from Sciascia to Tondelli, through Piersanti, and to cinema director, Matarazzi. Via the cinema medium, in the second part of this volume, attention is shifted to further central/marginal voices from further ‘margins’ of Europe and lands beyond that relate with the European continent by casting a glance towards it in order to construct their own identity: Turkey, Greece, Portugal, Algeria, Great Britain. Finally returning to an Italian voice, Pariani, writing from the margins of the province, and connecting Italy and Europe to the nostalgic backwards looking Argentinean Italian community through the dance of tango.