This book is the first dedicated volume of academic analysis on the monumental work of Elena Ferrante, Italy's most well-known contemporary writer. The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins brings together the most exciting and innovative research on Ferrante's treatment of the intricacies of women's lives, relationships, struggles, and dilemmas to explore feminist theory in literature; questions of gender in twentieth-century Italy; and the psychological and material elements of marriage, motherhood, and divorce. Including an interview from Ann Goldstein, this volume goes beyond "Ferrante fever" to reveal the complexity and richness of a remarkable oeuvre.

Autorentext

Grace Russo Bullaro is Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in English at the City University of New York, Lehman College, USA. She is the author of Beyond Life is Beautiful: Comedy and Tragedy in the Cinema of Roberto Benigni; Man in Disorder: The Cinema of Lina Wertmüller in the 1970s; From Terrone to Extracomunitario: New Manifestations of Racism in Italian Cinema; and Shifting and Shaping a National Identity: Transnational Writers and Pluriculturalism in Italy Today.

Stephanie V. Love is a Ph.D. student in Linguistic Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, USA. She has published articles in Current Issues in Language Planning, the International Journal of Multicultural Education, and Shifting and Shaping a National Identity,* edited by Grace Russo Bullaro and Elena Benelli.

Inhalt

Introduction: Beyond the margins.- Beyond the margins: Ferrante fever and Italian female writing, Grace Russo Bullaro and Stephanie Love.- Part I: Notes in the margins: historicizing Ferrante's fiction.- The era of the economic miracle and the force of context in Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, Grace Russo Bullaro.- Indexicalities of Language in Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels: Dialect and Italian as Markers of Social Value and Difference, Jillian Cavanaugh.- An educated identity: The school as a modernist chronotope in Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, Stephanie V. Love.- Part II: All that's left in the margins: Ferrante's poetics.- Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend: in search of Parthenope and the Founding of a New City, Franco Gallippi.- Performative Realism and Post-humanism in The Days of Abandonment, Enrica Maria Ferrara*.-* Elena Ferrante's Visual Poetics: Ekphrasis in Troubling Love, My Brilliant Friend, and* The Story of a New Name*, Stiliana Milkova.- Part III: Smarginatura: Motherhood and female friendship.- Metamorphosis and Rebirth: Greek Mythology and Initiation Rites in Elena Ferrante's Troubling Love, Tiziana de Rogatis.- Maternal Failure and its Bequest: Toxic Attachment in the Neapolitan Novels, Christine Maksimowicz.- Breaking Bonds: Refiguring Maternity in Elena Ferrante's The Lost Daughter*,* Leslie Elwell.- Telling the Abuse: A Feminist-Psychoanalytic Reading of Gender Violence, Repressed Memory and Female Subjectivity in Elena Ferrante's Troubling Love, Nicoletta Mandolini.- Dixit Mater: The Significance of the Maternal Voice in Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, Emma Van Ness.- Interview with Ann Goldstein, Grace Russo Bullaro and Stephanie Love.-** List of Contributors.- Index****