Roberta Grandi is a research fellow at the Università della Valle d’Aosta (Italy), where she teaches English literature and language. She took her degree at the State University of Milan, where she developed an insatiable curiosity for all forms of appropriations and rewritings. From this passion stemmed several international articles and essays, and two books, one on Austen’s film adaptations, and another on Shakespeare’s King Lear and its afterlife. It was during her PhD years, at the Catholic University of Milan, that she took up the study of Victorian burlesques, which led to her fascination for lesser-known or forgotten works and authors. The natural environment of her present workplace, instead, awakened in her a keen interest in mountain literature and ecocriticism. It should not surprise, then, that she fell in love with A.E.W. Mason and his mountaineering writings. She has presented papers on these topics at national and international conferences and published the essay “Mason and Pre-wartime Films: Patriotism and Heroism in The Four Feathers (1902) and Fire Over England (1936)” in 2019. She is also the creator and manager of a website entirely dedicated to this author – www.aewmason.com.
