NUBE is a new critical resource devoted to contemporary literatures, with special reference to cultural phenomena and to their links with the processes of identitary re-definition and hybridization which have involved Europe from the early 1990s. The journal NUBE develops in the frame of the research group bearing the same name (NUBE, Nuova Biblioteca Europea, ‘New European Library”), born in 2018 out of an agreement among departments from the universities of Verona (DiLLS), Padua (DiSLL) and Bologna (LILEC).

NUBE is meant to be an instrument for the discovery of our contemporariness through the investigation of new generations of writers, of emerging literary cases, of current literary debates. Literature participates in its own voice in the debates of every age by reflecting dynamics and shaping contents, in its turn. However, the contamination with historical, social and cultural developments appears to be more pronounced in the contemporary literary production. Here the traditional distinction between “high” and “low” literature is radically questioned, in favour of a mixture of genres, styles and methods which makes literature an inescapable element in the debate on contemporariness. NUBE aims to carry on investigations from this perspective, by linking a rigorous textual analysis with militant interest in contemporaneity.

NUBE sees the sensibilities and languages of literature as transnational phenomena that go beyond ideologies and forms of ethnocentrism and are able to establish social and communal solidarity. By Europe we do not mean an economic and political community, but an idea of culture that is extended beyond the boundaries of bureaucracy. The mediating and unifying potentials of the artistic medium neutralize national and supernational barriers and require a comparative perspective in the investigation of contemporaneity and its literary expressions: a wide analytical glance, open to the multiple cultural dynamics of the global world.

NUBE intends to be a crossroads of comparison and integration among different theoretical approaches and disciplines. We hope that a complex and articulate picture of different European realities can be sketched out of these multifarious perspectives, with a view to understanding and emphasizing common tendencies, points of connection and diversities.

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