Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance, and: Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement (review)
In his introduction to Contemporary Women Writers, Santo AricÃ3 chronicles a history of neglect of women writers and exclusion from the pedagogical and critical canon that the present volume hopes to correct. The volume includes essays on writers well-known in the English speaking worldÂ—Natalia Ginzburg, Elsa Morante, Oriana Fallad, Dacia MarainiÂ—as well as writers whose work is yet untranslatedÂ— Lalla, Cialente, Manzini, Lagorio, Guiducci, and Cederna. The chapters on Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg provide important new interpretive keys to these writers' well-known works. One hopes that Giovanna Miceli-Jeffries' essay on the lesser known Gianna Manzini will draw attention to her work, particularly her most innovative novel Lettera all'editore (not yet translated). Interspersed with these broad-ranging discussions of Italy's foremost women writers are several interesting close readings of single works. Anthony Tamburri provides an insightful reading of gendered roles in Maraini's Donne in guerra (Women at War). Santo AricÃ3 situates Fallad's Niente e cost sia (Nothing and Amen) in the context of the new journalism of Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer. Deborah Heller's reading of Anna Banti's Artemisia is one of the most interesting essays in the volume. Banti's novel is based on the story of the seventeenthcentury painter Artemisia Gentileschi who was raped at an early age and subsequently tortured during cross examination at the public rape trial. Heller analyzes the complex interplay between author-narrator and protagonist and suggests that "through her resuscitation of Artemisia she [Banti] will ultimately come into possession of the inheritance for which there is, tellingly, no adequate word in English or Italian: her rightful female patrimony." In a masterful analysis blending history, art history, and literary criticism, Heller shows how the discrepancies between the historical Artemisia and Banti's fictional Artemisia "seem designed to emphasize Artemisia's solitude as a necessary preparation for her sense of achievement."