Carla Dente

The essays collected in this volume are evidence that in contemporary parlance the notion of ‘money’ is often connected with the idea of global economy and ‘cultural globalization’: they prompt awareness of the growing importance of collapsed trade barriers, but also of the close and complex relationship between economic and political power and culture in a historical perspective. Shakespeare’s characters and stories played an important role in his own time when a new system of mercantile economy was developing out of geographical discoveries, and Common Law was trying to keep pace with current debates and regulations aimed at facilitating commerce. It is not surprising that economic themes, motifs and language rank high among the pressing cultural concerns to which Shakespeare gave shape in his works. This rapid, dramatic rise to prominence of economic questions is reflected in the pervasive monetary subtext of Shakespeare’s language and the baffling ubiquitousness of economic metaphors in his plays and poems. Today, globalization has contributed to move to the foreground the intercultural dimension to the reproduction and consumption of Shakespeare, a process that is clearly registered in the growing relevance taken on by the ‘new’ economic criticism and the new writings of his uniquely cosmopolitan afterlife.

Bringing together a wide range of critical perspectives, this volume records the lively debate on literature, language and culture from a transnational angle developed during and from an interna­tional conference that took place in Pisa in 2016.Cultural values are not fixed and predetermined, but result from complex, sometimes unpredict­able processes, and are always the outcome of an ongoing dialectic between tradition and innova­tion. The research presented here engages with cultural, linguistic and literary phenomena “in the making”. Individual essays from a variety of disciplines look at the way words, texts, ideas travel across time and space, at the dialogue they set up with their historical users, and at the networks and flows they install. Through the mapping and critical investigation of exemplary cases, Jour­neys through Changing Landscapes emphasizes transnationality as both a constitutive principle of culture and a method of scholarly analysis, advocating an understanding of culture as a dynamic field of encounter and exchange. Contributors to the volume: Dominique Goy-Blanquet, Nick Havely. Vincenzo Orioles, Enrico Terrinoni, Michael Wyatt and, with various roles in the Pisa University Research Group on ‘Transnational dislocations’, Marco Battaglia, Paolo Bugliani, Nicoletta Caputo, Giovanni Carlotti, Carla Dente, Enrico Di Pastena, Francesca Fedi, Roberta Ferrari, Sylvia Greenup, Angelo Monaco, Beatrice Montorfano, Filippo Motta, Andrea Nuti, Silvia Riccardi, Francesco Rossi, Anita Simonini, Sara Soncini.