DescriptionIn my dissertation, titled “At the End of the Word. Crisis and Language in Italian Post-Apocalyptic Fiction,” I aim to redefine the transnational genre of post-apocalyptic fiction by reading it through the lens of Italian narrative. My work includes chapters on texts as seemingly disparate as Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century Decameron and Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man and Massimo Bontempelli’s novella Cataclisma, Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Il deserto rosso and Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer prize-winning book The Road. I demonstrate how Italian narrative has played and still plays an important role in post-apocalyptic fiction, a genre that is deemed almost exclusively Anglo-American but one that actually owes some of its thematic and aesthetic elements to its Italian representatives. By analyzing both Italian and Anglophone texts, I show that a seemingly unlikely detour, such as the one running from the late Middle Ages through early 20th-century Italian Futurism, to the newest, zombie-packed, American TV shows, reveals not only something new about the Italian production of post-apocalyptic fiction, but also about the genre itself.