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theses

This dissertation examines the original mixture of Baroque legacy and Modernist experimentalism patterned after Virginia Woolf’s model in a selection of twentiethcentury Italian women writers. My research contributes to provide a better definition and a more thorough understanding of the Modernist phenomenon in Italy, by arguing that Italian literary modernity was achieved most successfully by the very writers who were unrepresented in the modernist literary canon, namely Ada Negri, Anna Banti, Gianna Manzini, and Anna Maria Ortese. Through Deleuze and Guattari’s reflections on a modern “virtual space,” Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “resemblances” among writers over time, Benjamin’s investigations on “modern phenomena, ” and Drucker’s examination of a “virtual espace” conceived by some early twentieth-century Western European painters, my comparative analysis at the intersection of art and literature demonstrates how the idea of a literary “espace” that characterizes modernity functions as an alternative space, a re-discovered homeland, even “a room of their own,” in the case of these prominent Italian women writers of the 20th century. Ultimately, my thesis shows how the Baroque legacy on one hand and the more or less explicitly acknowledged “literary motherhood” towards Virginia Woolf’s Modernism on the other constitute the traits that most characterize this “other reality,” perceived by the subject, beyond the more superficial façade of external reality. In fact, their literary output is marked by such an original combination of prose and lyrical stylistic features that clearly denotes, on one hand, a resemblance with the seventeenth-century rupture with the poised rationality of the Renaissance; and, on the other, with Woolf’s unprecedented experimentalism

ETD_7557

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Lucia Vedovi

doi:10.7282/T3Q81GDX

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.