The 21st century has seen a surge of popularity in texts that cross the borders between styles, genres and media, between real-life events and imagined ones, so that these texts are difficult to categorise or sometimes to distinguish as fiction or nonfiction. They might be called 'unidentified narrative objects', a term coined by the Italian writer Wu Ming 1 when discussing Italian literature after 2000 in his Memorandum on the New Italian Epic, whose writers have a common belief in the power of literature to effect change in society by depicting and re-assessing the past and present. Through analysing a number of recent Italian unidentified narrative objects, this study explores the potential of this experimental approach to the novel form.

Kate Willman completed her PhD at the University of Warwick and has since taught at the University of Bristol and held a fellowship at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (London).