Sceptical Fictions
Introduction to the History of Modern English Literary Self-Consciousness

Area 10 – Scienze dell'antichità, filologico-letterarie e storico-artistiche

In these times of “global fundamentalism” on the one hand and of the “reality show” global TV format on the other, where in both cases doubt and hesitation seem to have been expelled, fictions that interrogate themselves as such, and consequently question their artistic process of representing reality, seem thoroughly relevant. They may be called sceptical fictions. They are fictions that interrogate the reader too, inviting him to suspect and suspend his judgement, in short to be incredulous, making him wonder whether what is before him are quixotic giants or windmills. The aim of this study is to survey the history of the English novel against the grain, in search of fictional wavering, from the 18th century (when fiction was “invented”) up to the threshold of postmodernity, that is to say up to the brink of the implosion of fiction and the explosion of fictional scepticism (Ficciones was the title of Borges’ anthology of short stories published in 1944). Through this book, students of English literature may find a means to cast an oblique, different, gaze at the history of English novel.Luigi Cazzato teaches English Literature at the University of Bari. His articles, in English and Italian, have appeared in Allegoria, Textus, L'Indice, ISSA. His publications include essays in edited collections and books such as Generi, recupero, dissoluzione. L’uso del giallo e della fantascienza nella narrativa contemporanea (Schena, Fasano 1999); Metafiction of Anxiety: Modes and Meanings of the Postmodern Self-Conscious Novel (Schena, Fasano 2000); Laurence Sterne: Cock and Bull Stories (ETS, Pisa 2004). Recently, he has been also the author of essays on the cultural relationship between England and Southern Italy.

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