Italian writer and filmmaker Gianni Celati's 1989 philosophical travelogue Towards the River's Mouth explores perception, memory, place and space as it recounts a series of journeys across the Po River Valley in northern Italy. The book seeks to document the "new Italian landscape" where divisions between the urban and rural were being blurred into what Celati terms "a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude." Celati traveled by train, by bus, and on foot, at times with photographer Luigi Ghirri, at others exploring on his own without predetermined itineraries, taking notes on the places he encountered, watching and listening to people in stations, fields, bars, houses, squares, and hotels. In this way the book took shape as Celati traveled and wrote, gathering and rewriting his notes into "stories of observation" (9). Celati attempts to find meaning by seeking the uncertain limits of our ability to discern everyday surroundings. "Every observation," as he puts it, "needs liberate itself from the familiar codes it carries, to go adrift in the middle of all things not understood, in order to arrive at an outlet, where it must feel lost." At the forefront of the then-nascent spatial turn in the humanities, Towards the River's Mouth is a key text of what in recent years has been variously termed literary cartography, literary geography, and spatial poetics. Its call to carefully and affectionately examine our surroundings while attempting to step back from habitual ways of perceiving and moving through space, has resonated as much with literary scholars and other writers as with geographers and architects. By now a classic of twentieth-century Italian literature, it has in recent years garnered increasing attention, especially with the growth of ecocriticism and new materialism within the environmental humanities. This edition, translated into English for the first time, features an introduction that places Towards the River's Mouth in the context of Celati's other work, and a selection of ten scholarly essays by prominent figures in comparative literature and Italian studies.

Drawing on the recent renewal of interest in the debate on orality and literacy this book investigates the varying perceptions and representations of orality in contemporary Italian fiction, providing a fresh perspective on this rich and fast-developing debate and on the study of the Italian literary language. The book brings together a number of complementary approaches to orality from the fields of linguistics, literary and media studies and offers a detailed analysis of a broad variety of authors and texts that appeared over the last three decades - ranging from internationally acclaimed writers such as Celati, Duranti and Tabucchi, through De Luca and Baricco, to the latest generation of writers, such as Campo, Ballestra and Nove. By exploring the complementary facets of Italian orality, and its diachronical developments since the seventies, this study questions the traditionally dichotomic approach to the study of orality and literacy and posits a more flexible, cross-modal approach that accounts for the increasing hybridisation of text forms and media and for the greater interaction between the spoken and the written as well as their representations.

The photographer Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992) was one of the most significant Italian artists of the late twentieth century. This volume - the first scholarly book-length publication on Ghirri to appear in English - introduces his photographic and critical work to a broader audience and positions Ghirri as a key voice within global artistic debates. It breaks new ground by approaching Ghirri's oeuvre from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives, in order to take account of the breadth of his interests, the variety of his projects and the far-reaching impact of his work as a practitioner, writer, theorist and curator, both in the field of photography and beyond. Drawing on different approaches from disciplines including art history, theory of photography, literary and cultural studies, architecture, cartography, and place and landscape studies, the essays in the volume show how Ghirri redefined contemporary photography and helped shape the "spatial" or "landscape" turn in Italy and further afield.