| Summary: | This paper sets itself the goal to analyze the ways in which the discourses
that have been employed in rationalizing the political and cultural divide
between the 1orth and the South of (urope find an outlet in the context of
modern and contemporary Anglophone literature. My inquiry assumes the
existence of an isomorphic correspondence between (urope’s constitution
as centre against an Asian, African, or American other on the one hand,
and northern Europe’s self-positioning as centre of modernity through its
discursive otherization of the Southern countries. This conceptual premise
informs my characterization of the Anglophone popular literary discourse
on the Italian other as orientalist and colonial. More precisely, the object of
my inquiry is a discourse on the south of Europe, perhaps a “fantasizing”
about the counties and cultures of the European south that has, as one of its
functions, the reiteration of a cultural hierarchy based on a perceived divide
between more and less “modern” and “rational” places. To Italy, in particular,
this discourse has assigned a specific kind of ́othernessμ on which I will try
to shed some light in the course of my discussion of literary texts.
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