Second-hand Stories

The second-hand story is a narrative structure that hinges on a narrator who listens to and reports other people’s words. Updating the older literary convention of the reported tale and responding to the recent marked increase in both the production of and interest in autobiography, autofiction, reportage, and testimony, the second-hand story has become a key and distinctive structure in contemporary western literature. How has this form emerged, and why has it become so prominent? What is the significance of reporting a ‘ready-made’ story? And what purpose might it serve at a time in which literature is increasingly charged with ethical and political aims? This book traces the emergence and evolution of this form by focusing on contemporary Italian literature from 1980 to 2020. Blending close readings of works by Alberto Arbasino, Antonio Tabucchi, Helena Janeczek, Melania Mazzucco, and Luca Rastello, with broader reflections on literary form, memory, orality, and ethics, the book reveals how the second-hand story challenges traditional notions of authorship, resists neat periodisations, and opens up a new relational paradigm for understanding literature today.