Shaping Space and Mobilities in Contemporary Walking Narratives

Shaping Space and Mobilities in Contemporary Walking Narratives represents an exploration of the dynamic intersections between mobility, space, and literature. By focusing on walking as both a practice and a narrative device, the book illustrates how mobilities shape and reconfigure our experiences of space. Drawing from both literary and interdisciplinary approaches, the contributors engage with diverse themes, including urban flânerie, rural wanderings, migration, and queer spatialities. The research presented here shows how literary discourse mediates and constructs human relationships with space and place. Addressing with key theoretical movements such as the narrative, spatial, and mobilities turns, this book contributes to the recent humanities turn by advancing discussions within mobility studies, particularly in French and Italian contexts.

1. Introduction.-  2. Original French Introduction: “Mobile routes, cross-border thinking”.-  3. “The Flâneur and the tourist”.- 4. “Mapping and walking. The cartographic representation of the urban environment in Sergio Chejfec’s My two worlds”.- 5. “Peripheral geographies: mobile narratives on the margins of contemporary Italian cities”.- 6. “The new paces of the flâneur. Speed and wandering in the work of Jacques Réda”.- 7. “Walking and writing the ancient Italian roads”.- 8. “Ghost Mobility. Intermission”.- 9. “Between ‘queer space’ and ‘queer landscape’”.- 10. “Space and anxiety in contemporary literature”.- 11. "Breaking through material and immaterial walls”. - 12. “Michaël Batalla and the non-border limits of Europe”.- 13. “Incomplete and indisciplined bibliography”.

Adrien Frenay is Teaching Professor at the Université Paris Nanterre. He is a member of the Centre des Sciences des Littératures en Langue Française (CSLF) and of the Centre des Recherches Pluridisciplinaires Multilingues (CRPM), where he coordinates, with Lucia Quaquarelli, the international project Espace, Déplacement, Mobilité. His research focuses on the historical poetics of mobilities in the 19th and 20th century French novel.

Giulio Iacoli is Associate Professor at the University of Parma, where he teaches literary theory, sociology and comparatistics. His research fields include: contemporary narratives; inter artes relations (themes, phototexts, adaptations, rewritings); geographies and cartographies in literature; relations between writing and educational institutions; gender and queer studies.

Lucia Quaquarelli is Associate Professor in Italian Studies at the Université Paris Nanterre, she is the co-head of the Centre des Recherches Pluridisciplinaires Multilingues (CRPM) and coordinates, with Adrien Frenay, the international project Espace, Déplacement, Mobilité, and with Dorothée Cailleux the international project Les fabriques de la traduction. Her research focuses on contemporary narratives and on the cultural and political role of translation.