From text to screen/From screen to text. Collaborative narratives in twenty-first century Italian fiction: the Wu Ming case

This article examines collaborative narratives in twenty-first-century Italian fiction, with a special focus on the work of Wu Ming, a collective of five Italian writers who have challenged traditional authorship at a double level: in terms of individual authorship and, by extending their collaborative narrative practices to their readership in digital environments, in terms of author–reader relationship. While their creative output is mainly printed books, they have developed various forms of digital storytelling such as multimedia features of their novels, blogging, fan fiction, and social networking. How the concept of ‘collaborative narrative’ has evolved from print to digital storytelling is the leading question of my analysis. More specifically, by re-assessing the concepts of ‘authorship’ and ‘readership’, this article aims to explore what forms of interactivity and collaboration Wu Ming have developed to empower their readers in the construction of the narrative.