Inspired by the papers presented at the 28th biennial Conference of the Italian Association of English Studies, held in Pisa in September 2017, the essays collected in the Literature Section of this volume intend to contribute to a reflection on complexity and creativity in literary works, focusing both on the diachronic development of these two concepts through different ages and literary periods, and on their synchronic occurrence within texts and across genres. The wide time span covered by the essays, ranging from the early modern period to the contemporary, enables an extensive charting, as well as an inclusive and in-depth understanding, of an extremely rich phenomenology.
The papers included in the Culture Section draw together multiple strands which expatiate on a variety of issues and fields, such as the farreaching project and latest developments of Cultural Studies, trauma and ethnicity, globalisation and cyberspace, the politics of intermediality and communication patterns in social networks. An up-to-date and stimulating cartography is thus offered in which the paradigms of complexity, creativity and conventionality are crucially addressed and investigated in connection with their material contexts.
