- Caterina Colomba is a Research Fellow (RTDB) at the University of Salento (Lecce, Italy). She was a visiting scholar ... moreCaterina Colomba is a Research Fellow (RTDB) at the University of Salento (Lecce, Italy). She was a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York, for the academic year 2015-16. She holds a PhD in postcolonial studies (2007) and has been the recipient of several awards, including an Australia-Europe scholarship for pursuing academic research in Australia. She holds two Masters of Arts from Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne and in 2008 she was an adjunct Research Fellow within the Australian Research Institute at Curtin University of Technology (Perth). She has published essays and articles on English literature/s and, in particular, on Australian literature and culture, and translated stories and Aboriginal myths.
She has recently translated into Italian M. Oliphant et al., "Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciation" ("Romanziere del regno della regina Vittoria. Un libro di apprezzamenti", Mimesis, 2021). In 2016 she edited the volume "Pride and Prejudice: A Bicentennial Bricolage" (Forum, Udine) which includes her contribution “Dis/covering Characters: Clothes and Clothing in Pride and Prejudice and its Filmic Adaptations”.
Among her other publications:
- “History as Sharing Stories: Crossing the Cultural Divide Through Kim Scott’s Fiction”, in Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, vol. 17:2 (Fall 2011);
- “Art in Life/Life in Art. The “Catastrophe of Colonialism” in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting” in Living Art. Essays on Words and the World, edited by David Lucking, libreriauniversitaria.it, 2016;
- Righting 'herstory' in Margaret Atwood’s "Alias Grace" and Sarah Polley’s screen adaptation”, RVS - Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, XXV, 49, 2020, pp. 57-74;
- “Questioning Master Narratives of ‘Civility’ and ‘Savagery’: Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá” and The Ebb-Tide”, RSV - Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, XXIV, 48, 2019, pp. 87-106;
- “An Environmental Reading of David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon” in A. Riem Natale and J. Thieme (eds.) Ecology and Partnership Studies in Anglophone Literatures, Forum, Udine, 2020, pp. 39-56.edit
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This brief article concentrates on my personal experience in translating "Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations" (1897) into Italian. It provides a reflection on the role of the translator as a privileged... more
This brief article concentrates on my personal experience in translating "Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations" (1897) into Italian. It provides a reflection on the role of the translator as a privileged reader, as the one able to access more easily, to use Raymond Williams’s words, the structure of feeling, a narrative which is not fully articulated on the page but is to be inferred by reading between the lines. It intends to show how WNQVR reveals, to a close reader, new forma- tions of women’s thought struggling to emerge out of the dominant Victorian discourse while discussing the translation strategies which have been adopted, bearing in mind not only cultural and linguistic differences but also the historical distance that separates us from the original text.
Research Interests:
David Malouf’s acclaimed novel 'Remembering Babylon' (1993) fictionalizes the first years of European settlement in Australia focusing on the interrelations of people and place. Aware of the risks of speaking of or for Aboriginal people,... more
David Malouf’s acclaimed novel 'Remembering Babylon' (1993) fictionalizes the first years of European settlement in Australia focusing on the interrelations of people and place. Aware of the risks of speaking of or for Aboriginal people, Malouf adopts the figure of Gemmy Fairley, a white man gone ‘native’, to explore obliquely the black/white interaction and provide an opening for questions of belonging and not-belonging. In an interview with Nikos Papastergiadis, however, Malouf affirms that 'Remembering Babylon' is not a book “about a purely Australian experience. It is about an experience of landscape”. Reading Malouf’s novel in an ecocritical frame, this paper intends to investigate the interconnectedness between land, sense of rootedness and (dis)possession during the colonizing process, as well as to see if and how the land can be recoverable through imagination, through stories able to trespass the anthropocentric nature/culture divide while fostering a new paradigm based on a “reciprocity of perspectives, in which man and the world mirror each other”.
Research Interests:
In Mister Pip (2006), New Zealander writer Lloyd Jones transfers Charles Dickens' Great Expectations to Papua New Guinea. Through a skilful play of metanarrative cross-references, Jones gives lifeblood back to the Victorian text while... more
In Mister Pip (2006), New Zealander writer Lloyd Jones transfers Charles Dickens' Great Expectations to Papua New Guinea. Through a skilful play of metanarrative cross-references, Jones gives lifeblood back to the Victorian text while creating a new artistic work in which the 19th century enters into a dialogue with contemporary times o ering its reader a modern 'female' Bildungsroman. This paper explores how Great Expectations turns out to be instrumental for the growth of Matilda, Jones's main character, and for the development of the plot in a way that invites us to reflect on the imaginative power of literature and the unpredictable nature of its consequences in the world outside literary fiction.