Author | Wu Ming |
---|---|
Original title | Manituana |
Translator | Shaun Whiteside |
Language | Italian |
Genre | Novel |
Publisher | Verso Books |
Publication date | 2009 |
Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
Pages | 396 pp |
ISBN | 1-84467-342-1 |
Manituana is a novel by Wu Ming first published in Italian in 2007.
Wu Ming is a collective of five authors founded in 2000. The members were formerly associated with the Luther Blissett Project and wrote the international best-selling novel Q.
Manituana was initially conceived as the first episode of an 18th-century pan-Atlantic trilogy which the authors called "the Atlantic Triptych". All novels would be set in the last three decades of the 18th century, all across the Atlantic Ocean (North America, Europe, the West Indies and Africa), before and during the American and the French Revolutions.
In 2014, when L’Armata dei sonnambuli (The Army of Sleepwalkers) was published in Italy, the collective announced a new phase in their writing. They described historical fiction as "a form we practised for many years, until we decided to move on and use history in other ways […] We treasure what we have learned from exploring that genre and forcing its conventions, and we dedicate ourselves to new experiments”.[1] In a comment on the group’s official blog, Wu Ming stated that they had given up on the idea of completing the Atlantic Triptych, which became a diptych.