‘Speculative fiction’ is a widely used, but not universally accepted, critical category embracing literary presentations of utopias, dystopias, alternative histories, […]
Read moreRichard Ambrosini
is Professor of English Literature in the Department of International Studies of the Università di Roma Tre. His books include Conrad’s Fiction as Critical Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 1991-20082), Introduzione a Conrad (Laterza, 1991), II piacere della poesia inglese (Cuem, 2000), R. L. Stevenson: la poetica del romanzo (Bulzoni, 2001). He co-edited with Piero Boitani Ulisse: archeologia dell’uomo moderno (Bulzoni, Roma, 1998), and with Richard Dury Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) and European Stevenson (Cambridge Scholars, 2009). Aside from more than twenty essays on Stevenson, he has also written a number of essays ranging from Chaucer to Graham Greene, through Shakespeare, Coleridge, Kipling, and Conrad. Recently, he has moved into new areas of research, with three essays in Italian in which he has addressed issues combining race and geopolitics (“I documenti UNESCO sulla ‘Race Question’ e l’ambigua nascita dell’antirazzismo,” 2010), discussed the politics of contemporary literary theory (“Memoria storica e critica del presente: usi e abusi dei termini ‘multiculturalismo’ e ‘postcoloniale’,” 2012), and, in “Il mondo nuovo del romanzo 1900-1925” (2012), outlined a transnational canon in early 20th-century European literature. He has translated, among other novels, Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands, The Secret Agent and Chance, and Stevenson’s Treasure Island and The Beach of Falesá.