Collapsed Modernities in the Twenty-First-Century Southern European Novel

ABSTRACT

With a focus on a contemporary corpus of twenty-first-century Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Greek fiction that questions the peripheralization of these countries in European discourse, this essay aims to discuss Southern Europe as a literary space. Published around the 2008 financial crisis, these novels capture how the crisis’s onset precipitated the demise of a set of cultural, political, and institutional values previously taken for granted. Despite their national and local specificities, novels such as O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas (2002) by Lídia Jorge, Crematorio (2007) by Rafael Chirbes, Psomi, paideia, eleftheria (2012) by Petros Markaris, and I Chironi trilogy by Marcello Fois, critically reflect upon the long-standing realities of unequal development, historical hierarchies, and ambiguous positions within Europe, as well as upon deep-rooted orientalist perceptions of Europe’s South. A major trope cross-cuts these four novels: the so-called “economic miracles” of the second half of the twentieth century and their economic, political, cultural and environmental destructive drift as a major consequence of the accelerated modernization of late capitalism. Through our case studies, we develop our formal argument by exploring a crucial shared plot trigger: the death of a character as a metaphor for the ruins of a fading or collapsed modernity.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Translated into English as The Wind Whistling in the Cranes by Margaret Jull Costa and Annie McDermott for Liveright in 2022.

2. Translated as Cremation in 2021 by Valerie Miles for New Directions.

3. At present, there is no English translation of this novel. For this analysis, we have used the Spanish translation (Pan, educación, libertad, 2013) by Ersi Marina Samará Spiliotopulu for Tusquets Editores.

4. Dissatisfaction with European austerity measures gave rise to social movements such as the aganaktismenoi in Greece or the indignados in Spain. In Greece, Tziovas argues, this led the population to become gradually disaffected regarding the idea of Europe, raising doubts about the country’s cultural orientation and identity (2017, 19).

5. Other writers usually included in this label are Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri and Jean-Claude Izzo.

6. Translated from Italian into English by Silvester Mazzarella as Bloodlines (2014), The Time in Between (2015), and Perfect Light (2020) for MacLehose Press.

7. Lapia mentions Gli anni del nostro incanto (2017) by Giuseppe Lupo, Prima di noi (2020) by Giorgio Fontana, and I fratelli Michelangelo (2019) by Vanni Santoni.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the project “The Novel as Global Form. Poetic Challenges and Cross-border Literary Circulation” (Spanish Research Agency, PID2020-118610 GA-I00).

Notes on contributors

Aina Vidal-Pérez

Aina Vidal-Pérez is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Comparative Literature at the Universitat de les Illes Balears (UIB), Mallorca.

Violeta Ros

Violeta Ros is an Assistant Professor in Didactics of Literature at the Universitat de València (UV).