Description
Book SynopsisAlessia Ricciardi revisits questions about Elena Ferrante’s identity to show how the problem of authorship is deeply intertwined with the novels’ literary ambition and politics. Ricciardi reads Ferrante’s fiction as world literature, foregrounding the alleged writer Anita Raja’s work as a translator.
Trade ReviewConstructed as a literary detective story,
Finding Ferrante captures the reader as its object of investigation. By revealing who is behind the pseudonym, Ricciardi explores the explosive linguistic energy of an extraordinary writer whose story-telling seductive power, like a Gramscian experiment by literary means, accounts for ‘an intimate public sphere'—one in which the ambivalent yet productive forms of trust between women encounter the generative practices and topographies of female relationality. -- Adriana Cavarero, University of Verona
In
Finding Ferrante, Ricciardi offers a lucid, imaginative, and richly informed study of all of Elena Ferrante’s work, emphasizing the crucial concept of resistance that appears throughout the enigmatic writer’s books. -- Michael Wood, author of
Children of Silence: On Contemporary FictionAlessia Ricciardi’s fascinating book offers Anglophone readers a new Ferrante: a participant in German and Italian literary traditions, a cunning theorist of realism and of the writing self, an urban cartographer, a political thinker. In expertly “situating” Ferrante’s writing in its intellectual and literary contexts, Ricciardi sets that writing in motion. -- David Kurnick, Rutgers University
Despite the numerous interpretive essays devoted to Elena Ferrante's literary work, Alessia Ricciardi's book fills a hermeneutic void. Ricciardi deciphers with great sharpness the game of mirrors and identities of the writer, including that of the pseudonym. In doing so, she succeeds in bringing to the surface a conceptual structure that remained unexplored until now. A necessary book. -- Simona Forti, Scuola Normale Superiore
To understand Ferrante, you have to find her. That’s the brilliant premise behind Alessia Ricciardi’s eloquent account of Ferrante’s radical critique—not only of patriarchy but also of cruel work, sex, and power. Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet becomes the scene for Ricciardi’s reappropriation of the novels as a site for reconsidering the joys of anti-work, feminist solidarity, and world literature. One of if not the best book on Ferrante extant,
Finding Ferrante is destined to become a classic. -- Timothy C. Campbell, author of
The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Form of LifeRicciardi ignores the guidance of Ferrante and
Frantumaglia to draw her own, refreshingly original conclusions about the Neapolitan Novels and how they fit into not just our understanding of Italian culture but also world literature. * Public Books *
This excellent monograph will doubtless divide opinion but should nevertheless be welcomed as an original and seriously considered interpretative effort. * Comparative Critical Studies *
A valuable critical work. * Italian Studies *
Ricciardi sets out to examine the ‘extraordinary encounter’ between Italian and German-language literatures staged on the pages of Ferrante’s four Neapolitan Novels. She accomplishes this goal successfully, proposing a number of original interpretations and mobilizing an impressive set of analytical tools drawn from feminist philosophy and political theory. * Journal of Modern Italian Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Questions of Identity
1. Cruel Sexuality
2. Working Women
3. Political Cosmologies
4.
Genius LociNotes
Index
