Speculative Identities: Contemporary Italian Women's Narrative

Since the early 1980s, the novel has been deemed by many Italian women writers to be the most apt vehicle for creating positive images of the future of women. The novel becomes the space for confession, while at the same time allowing greater expressive freedom. Narrative levels become mirrors, narrator and character are immersed in the same past, a sort of double memory is formulated. In this game of 'speculations', the search for an individual identity (truth) is also taken into account, namely, the creation of an identity through a 'double subjectivity'. There is no longer one voice for the 'feminine role' and, by creating heroines who are also intellectuals, these authors offer their readers models of alternative versions of self. The study is a partial inventory of the new women's narrative and aims to provide a broad literary framework through which both the general reader and the student can appreciate the characteristics and innovations of contemporary Italian women's fiction. The writers chosen for this study (Ginevra Bompiani, Edith Bruck, Paola Capriolo, Francesca Duranti, Rosetta Loy, Giuliana Morandini, Marta Morazzoni, Anna Maria Ortese, Sandra Petrignanni, Fabrizia Ramondino, Elisabetta Rasy and Francesca Sanvitale) have achieved both critical acclaim and public recognition and their texts demonstrate the richness of voices, topics and structures in Italian women's writing today. Rita Wilson is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Chairperson of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She has published studies on images of Africa in Italian literature, and on several contemporary Italian authors, including Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Antonio Tabucchi.

Rita Wilson is Associate Professor of Italian and Chairperson of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.