Gillian Ania
Introduction. New Italian Authors: Into the New Millennium
Essays on Tullio Avoledo, Aldo Nove, Daniele Del Giudice, Claudio Piersanti

The conference «New Authors/Auteurs: Into the New Millennium», organised by Drs Gillian Ania and William Hope (University of Salford 27-28 June 2008) aimed to identify new developments and working practices in Italian narrative and film from the 1990s to the present. In particular it invited contributors to investigate the extent to which the turn of the millennium and its contingent socio-economic and cultural climates was conditioning the work of Italian writers and directors.
In literature, for example, to what extent were novelists being influenced by technological developments, or media-related concerns? Were market forces causing writers to follow commercially tried-and-tested formulas and fashionable trends? Or were they consciously experimenting and stretching creativity to new limits? At the turn of the millennium, in short, could a writer still simply write - and publish - the novel that was "within"?
Two guest speakers were invited to discuss some of these issues in the light of their experience in their respective fields. Novelist Tullio Avoledo, from Friuli, gave a fast-paced lecture entitled Il futuro non è più quello di una volta (echoing American poet Mark Strand); in this he spoke about his career in banking, his political and anti-global viewpoint, and the many aspects of contemporary life (and not solely in Italy) that compel him to write fiction - in protest. Writer and critic Geoffrey Nowell-Smith treated participants to an insightful address entitled The Afterlife of Art Cinema, in which he examined the validity of notions such as Italian national cinema and auteurism in the 21st century.
This issue of the «Bollettino» is pleased to feature four articles on literary narrative, from papers presented at Salford: Chapter 1, Krešimir Purgar, Reading Nove Through Baudrillard: Irony and Dread of Television Images in «Superwoobinda»; Chapter 2, Angela Guiso, Il compromesso della modernità: La scrittura di Daniele Del Giudice tra attualità e tradizione; Chapter 3, Gillian Ania, Tullio Avoledo's début novel, «L'elenco telefonico di Atlantide»: Millennial Inspirations and Constraints; and Chapter 4, Marina Spunta, Claudio Piersanti e la «fuga dal mondo». The cinema papers have appeared in the volume: William Hope (ed.), Italian Film Directors in the 21st Century, Newcastle (UK), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.

Contributors
Dr Gillian Ania (University of Salford)
Angela Guiso (University of Cagliari / Liceo Fermi, Nuoro)
Krešimir Purgar (Center for Visual Studies, Zagreb)
Dr Marina Spunta (University of Leicester)

Bollettino '900 - Electronic Journal of '900 Italian Literature - © 2010

<http://www3.unibo.it/boll900/numeri/2010-i/Ania1.html>

Giugno-dicembre 2010, n. 1-2