Sidia Fiorato Bücher

The book explores the intricate relationship between literature and science, particularly in the late twentieth century, through the lens of groundbreaking scientific theories such as Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. It highlights how these theories reflect indeterminacy and challenge universal values, while also illustrating the reciprocal influence of literature on scientific thought. John Banville's tetralogy examines key scientific figures who transformed worldviews, emphasizing the creative processes in both science and literature as they seek to comprehend a complex reality.

In the Renaissance period the body emerges as the repository of social and cultural forces and a privileged metaphor for political practices and legal codification. Due to its ambivalent expressive force, it represents the seat and the means for the performance of normative identity and at the same time of alterity. The essays of the collection address the manifold articulations of this topic, demonstrating how the inscription of the body within the discursive spheres of gender identity, sexuality, law, and politics align its materiality with discourses whose effects are themselves material. The aesthetic and performative dimension of law inform the debates on the juridical constitution of authority, as well as its reflection on the formation and the moulding of individual subjectivity. Moreover, the inherently theatrical elements of the law find an analogy in the popular theatre, where juridical practices are represented, challenged, occasionally subverted or created. The works analyzed in the volume, in their ample spectre of topics and contexts aim at demonstrating how in the Renaissance period the body was the privileged focus of the social, legal and cultural imagination.