Introduction. Dystopian Worlds: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Analyse Transformations in Literature, Media and Politics

This collected book contains the proceedings of a conference held at Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan in September 2022. The conference was an occasion of dialogue and discussion among several disciplines involved in the study of dystopias and their relevance in the contemporary scenario. The “Dystopian Worlds beyond Storytelling” project—involving political theorists, sociologists, historians, linguists, literature scholars, media, communications and performing arts researchers, and many others—was born around the convergence of multiple fields of analysis, signalling the heterogeneity and richness of the phenomena underlying the fears of contemporary societies and their representations and discourses in public debate and popular culture. The book is structured in five parts, each one expressing a particular point of view on the role of dystopias in the twenty-first century. These parts are not sectorial, since our aim is to provide a transdisciplinary focus on the issue of dystopia in reading through the lens of a wide range of perspectives and extracting a pluralistic vision of such a complex theme.