Michela Meschini

Between Worlds: Urban Trajectories in Contemporary Women’s Fiction

This paper explores the perception and narration of urban space in the work of the Italian-Indian author Gabriella Kuruvilla, in whose writing the city of Milan functions simultaneously as a generative source of storytelling and as a central structural component of the narrative itself. Drawing primarily on the novel Milano, fin qui tutto bene (2012), the inquiry aims to demonstrate how the narration of the city operates as a vehicle for the redefinition — in terms of spatiality — of questions of gender and identity, whilst simultaneously enabling the author to reformulate the cultural discourse on migration within the fabric of everyday urban life.

Kuruvilla’s urban poetics is situated within a broader comparative framework by drawing on the tradition of British city writing, in which the metropolis has long served as both subject and narrative method. Writers such as Zadie Smith, whose novels White Teeth (2000) and NW (2012) map the multicultural topographies of North London, and Andrea Levy, whose Small Island (2004) reimagines post-war London as a site of colonial encounter and displacement, offer productive points of comparison. The urban landscape in these authors, as in Kuruvilla, is never merely a backdrop: it is an active force that shapes, fragments, and reconstitutes the identities of those who move through it and is mobilised to interrogate questions of race, migration, and cultural hybridity.

The theoretical and conceptual grounding for this investigation will be drawn from Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, Henri Lefebvre’s tripartite theory of the production of space, and the broader geocritical debate as developed by Bertrand Westphal and Robert Tally. Together, these frameworks provide the analytical tools necessary to interrogate how literary representations of the city by women writers can displace and reimagine dominant narratives of belonging, enabling authors working across different national and linguistic traditions — from the streets of Milan to those of London — to articulate new, spatially-grounded forms of subjectivity and cultural identity.