Eterotopie londinesi nel Fantasy urbano: tre casi dalla narrativa anglofona contemporanea

This thesis examines the representation of London’s urban space in contemporary anglophone fantasy through Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, understood as a theoretical tool capable of illuminating the dynamics of otherness, displacement, and threshold that characterize the postmodern metropolis. Situating itself within the debate on the spatial turn and geocriticism, the study proposes an interdisciplinary approach that brings together literary theory, the semiotics of urban space, and narrative cartography, with the aim of investigating how urban fantasy constructs counter-spaces that critically reflect the social, political, and cultural tensions of the present. The first chapter reconstructs the theoretical framework, focusing on the evolution of the concept of heterotopia in Foucault’s thought and on its subsequent critical reworkings. This is complemented by a theoretical survey of the categories of the fantastic, fantasy, and urban fantasy, understood as narrative domains structurally predisposed to the emergence of alternative spatialities and to the staging of threshold devices between the real and the imaginary. The chapter also brings heterotopia into dialogue with related notions such as the chronotope, non-place, and Thirdspace, and discusses the categories of boundary, frontier, and liminality, which are fundamental for understanding the mechanisms of access and transition between narrative spaces, together with the methodologies of geocriticism and literary cartography. The following chapters are devoted to the analysis of three case studies: J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. In Rowling’s work, London emerges as a dyadic spatial system articulated between the ordinary world and the magical world, in which thresholds and objects acquire a strong symbolic value. In Neverwhere, London Below is configured as an underground heterotopia that critically reflects the dynamics of exclusion and marginalization in the neoliberal metropolis. In The Night Circus, finally, the circus space is read as a oneiric and computational heterotopia, suspended between dream, design, and ludic-digital logics. The thesis demonstrates that in urban fantasy heterotopia functions not only as a narrative device, but also as a critical instrument capable of problematizing the relationship between the real and the imaginary, center and margin, visible and invisible, offering a symbolic map of the contradictions of contemporary London.