The Legacy of the Water: A Comparative Study of the Literary and Urban Identities of Glasgow and Genoa

Research question(s)/problem: In this PhD project, my research questions explore the similarities in the historical evolution of Glasgow and Genoa, and how they have articulated and informed the literary portrayals of these post-industrial cities. This study will interpret the urban phenomena depicted in late twentieth-century literary works that are considered culturally representative by major literary and cultural critics. It discusses and compares the writing of Scottish authors including Alasdair Gray, Agnes Owens (1926-2014) and James Kelman (1946-), with the poetry of Italian authors such as Eugenio Montale and Fabrizio De André. This investigation will highlight the similarities in the historical evolution of the Scottish and Italian cities-Glasgow and Genoa, seen through the lens of site-specific literary works. This will allow a better understanding of how the urban context might have conditioned the literary production of the authors as well as the relevant theoretical criticism associated with pertinent works that engender the character of the two cultural geographies from which they emerged.
Glasgow and Genoa share momentous histories as shipbuilding powerhouses, progressive demographic declines, and strategies of re-branding as cities of culture. My primary objective is to establish that their parallel development might also have laid the foundations of an unwritten kinship and/or cultural sensibility which, by way of a resilient and proud industrial heritage, is embodied in both cities' essential modern identity.
The analysis is wholly integrated with a complement of original etched and embossed works that exemplify not only the authors' consideration of the specific city's urban fabric but also their wider cultural substructures. An area of specific interest will be the holistic evaluation of the means in which metropolitan structures can influence and shape fictional narratives within the cultural paradigm (e.g. Gray's better nation trope). An auxiliary but critically vital role is played by the antagonistic topographical condition of the two cities. This will be measured by the manufacture of cross-sections as the explanatory graphical component of the pre-eminently vertical organization of Genoa, in juxtaposition with the horizontal layout of Glasgow, signally intelligible through the Nolli Map (1748), a pictorial delineation of the urban space reliant on a two-dimensional plan drawing.