Emilio Salgari: The Tiger Is Still Alive! [Hardcover]

Who created the most famous Southeast Asian hero during the heyday of imperialism and colonialism? Who inaugurated withThe Mysteries of the Black Jungleover a century long link uniting the Italian imaginary to the Indian one? Who envisioned the most celebrated interracial love stories of world literature, those between Sandokan, leader of the Tigers of Mompracem, and Marianna, the Pearl of Labuan, between Tremal-Naik, the Bengali snake catcher, and Ada, the Virgin of Kalis temple at the time of the British Raj? Who defined the Caribbean as a symbolic trope of plunder and rebellion through the melancholic viewpoint of the Black Corsair and the forsaken love for his enemys daughter? Who created Yanez de Gomera, a most famous Portuguese hero, and the imperfect voice of white anti-colonialism?
It was Italys great adventure novelist, Emilio Salgari (Verona, 1862  Turin, 1911). From the Mahdis revolt in Sudan to the African slave trade, from the Philippine insurgency to the Mediterranean at war between Turks and Christians, and to ancient Egypt, Salgaris breath-taking plots, together with his indigenous heroes and heroines in Vietnam, Thailand, Venezuela, Arctic Canada, the American Far West, the Chinese diaspora, deeply challenge canonical colonialist representations by contemporary Victorian authors like Conrad, Kipling, and Forster.

Paola Irene Galli Mastrodonato, PhD, is a retired faculty member of Tuscia University, Viterbo, Italy.Galli Mastrodonatos monograph is an extraordinary work, written with extraordinary passion and no less extraordinary competence, destined to remain a reference text for anyone dealing with Emilio Salgari and his role in Italian modern letters. It is also a work which conclusively proves that Emilio Salgari has not only been the major Italian author of adventure fiction, worth to be included in the Pantheon of high literature, but also an absolutely unique example of a counter-Orientalist fiction-writer in thl��