Since its economic boom in the late 1950s, Italy has grappled with the environmental legacy of rapid industrial growth and haphazard urban planning. One notable effect is a preponderance of interstitial landscapes such as abandoned fields, polluted riverbanks, and makeshift urban gardens. Landscapes in Between analyses authors and filmmakers – Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gianni Celati, Simona Vinci, and the duo Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco – who turn to these spaces as productive models for coming to terms with the modified natural environment.

Considering the ways in which sixty years’ worth of Italian literary and cinematic representations engage in the ongoing dialogue between nature and culture, Monica Seger contributes to the transnational expansion of environmental humanities. Her book also introduces an ecocritical framework to Italian studies in English. Rejecting a stark dichotomy between human construction and unspoilt nature, Landscapes in Between will be of interest to all those studying the fraught relationship between humanity and environment.

Monica Seger is an assistant professor of Italian Studies at The College of William and Mary.

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‘This is an important contribution to the growing internationalization of ecocriticism.’

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature & Environment – online 12 August 2015

‘This book shows a solid theoretical and analytical structure, thus enriching the ever expanding panorama of ecocritical studies concerning the Italian context… Seger’s book becomes a solid brick to add to an edifice that is still in the process of being built.’

Annali d'Italianistica Vol 33:2015