Tra esistenza ed evanescenza: riconfigurazioni del personaggio virgiliano in Lavinia di Ursula K. Le Guin

An iconoclastic personality and one of the most remarkable North-American authors of the twentieth century, Ursula K. Le Guin provides intellectual nourishment among contemporary scholars interested in myth revision and fictional-world design. This paper deals with Lavinia (2008), a fictional autobiography of the eponymous heroine, Lavinia of Latinum, with whom Aeneas allegedly founded Lavinium, an ancient town regarded as a religious territory by the early Latin peoples. This contribution aims at analyzing the complex and elliptical building of a character’s identity along the lines of a nuanced dialectic between selfhood and otherness. Light will be shed on the process by which the divine power of Albunea enters the picture of Lavinia’s mystic development as a sibylline character. Moreover, by adopting a multilayered approach which draws on comparative analysis, history, and quantum theory in connection with the protagonist’s ontology as well as Virgil’s, the hermetic elements of the novel will be singled out.