Echoes of memory

This book is the result of a master’s thesis that sought to analyse Umberto Eco’s 2004 illustrated novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Based on studies of memory and identity within the work, it provides an overview of the construction of Eco’s narrative and its unfolding in terms of content, observing the peculiarities of the construction of time-space and the narrator-character and, in this way, finds a parallel between the history of the novel and the history of the composition of Italian identity. It addresses the themes of the Second World War and its influence on the construction of the Italian ideology, as well as the influence of Pop Art on the construction of the narrative, which is related to the era in which it is set, as well as drawing a confluent line between the concepts of individual memory, collective memory and plant memory, the latter being a concept of the author of the novel himself. What this analysis proposes is confirmation of the relationship between the author, the work and the reader, who are the components of the narrative pyramid that gives the work its full meaning. In this way, the interpretation of a literary text is relativised, and this is one of the possible analyses of this rich novel.