“Al crocevia di fertili negoziazioni”

From an interdisciplinary overview, the paper focuses on the intricate scenery of the ongoing debate concerning the origins and theorizations of the English novel, highlighting the disruptive impact of new critical stances, from Cultural Studies to Gender and Postcolonial Studies and New Historicism, that all have contributed to a radical revision of the national and patriarchal canonization that the ‘modern’ genre had undergone in the last two centuries. Indeed, the critical re-mapping of the eighteenth century as a turbulent, transitional, unstable cultural era has turned the attention to the complex and delicate interplay between tradition and innovation, conformism and transgression, ‘Ancients’ and ‘Moderns’, eroticism and power at stake at the core of the novel itself as a flexible and omnivorous genre, a ‘new’ and privileged site of cultural production for the agenda of national, social and sexual acculturation. Accordingly, the most recurring image discussed in the paper is that of a crossroads of multiple, fruitful negotiations in order to account for the provisional, problematic and open-ended character of the debate itself.