New Italian Epic
New Italian Epic is a definition suggested by the Italian author Wu Ming 1 to describe a body of literary works written in Italy by various authors starting in 1993, at the end of the so called ‘First Republic’. This body of works is described as being formed of novels and other literary texts, which share various stylistic characteristics, thematic constants, and an underlying allegorical nature. They are a particular kind of metahistorical fiction, with peculiar features that derive from the Italian context.
The definition was made by Wu Ming 1 in March 2008, during the work on ‘Up Close & Personal’, a seminar on contemporary Italian literature held at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Over the next few days the author proposed and discussed the expression in debates at other North American colleges, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, within the context of the programme of Comparative Media Studies directed by Henry Jenkins.
From these interventions the author drew the essay New Italian Epic. Memorandum 1993-2008: narrative, oblique gaze, return to the future, published online in the spring of the same year. During the whole of 2008 the expression found a vast echo online, in conferences and conventions, in newspapers, in the specialist press and in radio broadcasts. In Italy, too, Wu Ming 1 put forward the expression ‘New Italian Epic’ [NIE] in English.
In late 2008 Wu Ming put online a version of the Memorandom marked ‘2.0’, or annotated and extended, with replies to some criticisms and closer examination of the more controversial points.
In January 2009 the series Stile Libero of the Einaudi publishing house published a further enriched and updated version of the Memorandum (‘3.0’), entitled New Italian Epic. Literatures, oblique gazes, returns to the future.
The Memorandum was intended as an "open suggestion of comparative reading, an album of notes to be borne in mind, remembered, used" and suggests that attention should be paid to a group of works written in Italy over the past fifteen years (1993–2008), seeking unexpected similarities or, conversely, dissolving connections too often taken for granted
The Memorandum has also been described as a literary manifesto, by virtue of the fact that it contains a classification. According to the author and other participants in the debate, the term ‘manifesto’ is misleading, because this is a document in the form of a pamphlet that does not herald a movement of authors or prescribe anything, but describes a posteriori a dialogue between already existing books, delineating the characteristics of a series of works that go beyond post-modernism, ‘NIE is only one of the many, good and different things that are happening today in Italian literature’, as the preface to edition 2.0 puts it.
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