Quaderni d’italianistica, Vol. 37, no. 1, 2016, 9–16 Hybridity in G IALLO : The Fruitful Marriage Between Italian Crime Fiction and Theatre, Literary Geographies, and Historical and Literary Fiction Brigid Maher and Barbara Pezzotti Tis special issue is devoted to the analysis of hybridization in crime fction. According to David Duf, generic hybridization is “[t]he process by which two or more genres combine to form a new genre or subgenre; or by which elements of two or more genres are combined in a single work” (Duf, “Key Concepts” xiv). Tis broad defnition captures quite neatly the forms of overt experimentation with genre conventions often considered characteristic of contemporary literature (Hassan 170) and other art forms. For Jutta Ernst, the term “hybrid genres” de- notes literary forms that unite characteristics of diferent genres and that, because they explode conventional genre typologies, cannot adequately be described with the genre designations used in the Western literary tradition (267). In the last few decades, many scholars have explored hybridization in lit- erature. Both Christin Galster (15) and Klaudia Seibel (137) begin their studies of literary hybrids by stressing the distinctness and heterogeneity of the literary classes as a precondition for the formation of hybrids; some scholars prefer to use the terms “blurring” (Hutcheon 9) or “dissolution” of genre boundaries (Duf, “Introduction” 16). Finally, very recently Martina Allen has supported the use of “conceptual blending” as opposed to “genre mixing” for indicating the creation of dynamic conceptual structures constructed for specifc purposes and according to specifc situations (Allen 12). In any case, analyzing contemporary literature, Ansgar Nünning sees a “proliferation of hybrid genres” which integrate factual ma- terial into fctional narratives such as “the New Journalism” and the “non-fction novels,” “historiographic metafction,” “documentary fction,” a revisionist type of “postmodernist historical novel,” “uchronian fantasy,” “parahistorical novels,” and “factifction” (282). More dramatically, Fishelov declares that “hybridization in literature is […] more common than hybridization in nature” (20). All these views imply that literature has a dynamic nature that allows such blurring or dissolution.