Detecting Nineteen Eighty-Four in Italian Alternate History and Future/Past Narratives (1948–1984)

Due to its structural complexity, 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' poses itself as a real watershed within dystopian literature, involving a vision of history conceived as a discontinuous and non-linear progress. By such a token – and because of its enduring ability to spread to other cultural contexts – the representation of totalitarianism in Orwell’s last novel is translated into a narrative structure with implicit uchronic components, exerting its impact also in the field of alternate history. This article aims to examine the various reverberations of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four', focusing on the Italian panorama and, in particular, on the unfinished novel by Corrado Alvaro ('Belmoro'), the uchronies of Guido Morselli ('Romasenza papa' and 'Contro-passato prossimo'), and the short story by Luigi Malerba '4891'. Ranging fromthe 1950s to the early 1980s,Alvaro, Morselli, and Malerba’sworks, through the combined devices of dystopia and alternate history, offer a critical picture of the transformations of Italian society in those years.