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This article discusses Jhumpa Lahiri’s recent turn to Italian through a formal and linguistic analysis of the creative and editorial projects she has undertaken in the last decade. By analyzing the author’s trajectory from In Other Words (2016) to Whereabouts (2021) and by discussing two short stories she has published in the interval between her linguistic autobiography and her first Italian novel, the article argues that Lahiri’s aesthetic and political concerns have transitioned from a utopian search for cosmopolitan encounters to a sharper attention to place-making and grounded relationality. Concurrently, her writing has moved from the pursuit of placeless abstraction to a more pronounced interest in site-specific forms of social bonding. The article further situates Lahiri’s translingual practice within paradigms of postcolonial, diasporic, and translingual writing, and discusses how her choice to forsake a dominant language for a semi-peripheral one requires a different critical approach that considers both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. In fully embracing the precarious translational space between Italian and English, the article contends that Lahiri’s latest reinvention contributes to deprovincializing both the Italian and the Anglophone literary field, while offering new ways of articulating identity, cultural belonging, and community in comparative and world literature studies.

A comparative study of contemporary realist novels that employ totality as a method and a formal principle to represent the social and economic inequalities of the present, this book examines writing in English, Italian, Kannada, and Spanish by authors from Zimbabwe, Ghana, Italy, India and Mexico.

By theorizing four modalities of totalization employed by contemporary realist writers, this book explores the current resurgence of realism and challenges critical approaches that consider it naive or formally unsophisticated. Instead, it argues that realist novels offer a self-conscious and serious representation of the world we inhabit while actively envisioning new social designs and political configurations. Through comparative studies of novels by Fernanda Melchor, NoViolet Bulawayo, Vivek Shanbhag, Nicola Lagioia, Igiaba Scego, Yaa Gyasi and Roberto Bolaño, this book further explains why realism can be a powerful antidote to the skepticism about the possibility of making truth-claims in humanist research.

This essay explores the representation and theorisation of the city in Teju Cole’s novels – Every Day Is for the Thief (2007), Open City (2011), and Tremor (2023). It argues that Cole’s writing articulates a new grammar of city-ness premised on historicised relationality and comparative thinking, thus challenging paradigms of urban representation that universalise the Western city. In particular, I propose that Cole’s novels offer a rewriting of Lagos and New York as specifically textual constructions, in which histories of modernity and colonisation get crystallised into their social geographies and cultural infrastructures. By close reading these texts and by drawing from the insights of postcolonial and literary urban studies, I analyse the formal devices – from variations in perspective to restricted focalisation – that Cole employs to textualise the city and its political histories. Through form, Cole’s novels raise crucial questions, both ethical and narrative, about representability, language, and historical violence in urban settings.