Il Meraviglioso metropolitano e gli spazi-tempi incantati della città

Until the nineteenth century urban experience wasn’t the heart of fictional plots. The city was a place outside of the “real” world, the rural one. But after only fifty years and a dizzy acceleration with modernity, urban experience would become so much foregone that it seems banal: the same world was becoming, and partly it had already become, fundamentally urban and metropolitan. Literature won’t take a long time to express the anxiety, fears and desires coming from the changes in progress in the urban way of living. This overturned function of literature will be one of the underlying themes of the thesis: though quite different in their epochs and forms, literary texts studied in this work will express matters exactly contrary to those of functionality and rationality that were being established in the modern urban and western space. In fact the hallmark of the texts taken into consideration will be the desire to imagine urban space as a still charming and enchanted place, or to imagine it in a different way from reality.