Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women’s Writing

Tiziana de Rogatis · Katrin Wehling-Giorgi

Dec 2022 · Sapienza Università Editrice

About this ebook

This edited volume is the first to propose new readings of Italian and transnational female-authored texts through the lens of Trauma Studies. Illuminating a space that has so far been left in the shadows, Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women’s Writing provides new insights into how the trope of trauma shapes the narrative, temporal and linguistic dimension of these works. The various contributions delineate a landscape of female-authored Italian and transnational trauma narratives and their complex textual negotiation of suffering and pathos, from the twentieth century to the present day. These zones of trauma engender a new aesthetics and a new reading of history and cultural memory as an articulation of female creativity and resistance against a dominant cultural and social order.

About the author

Tiziana de Rogatis is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University for Foreigners of Siena. She has published widely on Montale, Eliot and Valéry, and on Morante, Ferrante, Adichie and Atwood. She is the author of Elena Ferrante’s Key Words. Her most recent research focuses on the connection between trauma and narrative structures in World Literature, with a specific attention to women writers, translingual narratives and the Global Novel. She is Principal Investigator in the international project Traumas of Migration and Public Health Industry (PNRR 2022/2025).

Katrin Wehling-Giorgi is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Durham University. She is the author of Gadda and Beckett (Legenda, 2014), and she has published widely on women writers including Morante, Sapienza, Sebold and Ferrante, with a specific focus on structural violence and the poetics of trauma. She has co-edited the special journal issue Elena Ferrante in a Global Context (2021) and Goliarda Sapienza in Context (2016). Her current research focuses on female subjectivity through the lens of Visual Studies and trauma in twentieth-century and contemporary Italian and World Literature.