Grazia Deledda’s Painterly Aesthetic
Due Date: 10-01-2022
Grazia Deledda is the sole Italian female writer to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature (1926). Her opus has traditionally been read through the movements of Verismo and Decadentismo and a regional perspective. However, as new studies shed light on the breadth and depth of her participation in literary conversations, it becomes clear that her works should be read through new investigative lenses and as participants in dialectical relationships with other disciplinary fields and interpretive structures.
The proposed collection of essays, coedited with Angela Guiso, will undertake a new reading of Deledda’s works inside the larger context of modernist artistic movements, focusing on the texts’ visual dimension. Keeping in mind that Deledda, as she herself noted while nevertheless reconfirming her choices, was “accused of having wasted too much color and too much paint on my landscapes” (A cavallo, 1926), the volume investigates the aesthetic strategies of modernist visual art she decodifies and translates to give corporeality to her literary vision—to “paint” the urban and natural settings her characters populate. Meanwhile, to further understand the dialectical interplay between Deledda’s literature and the international artistic community representative of or in line with modernist movements, the volume investigates the conversation between Deleddian literature and the literature of authors who produce texts with a painterly sensibility, such as (but not limited to) Hardy, Mansfield, Noailles, Wharton, Wilde, Woolf, as well as representatives of the visual arts. Analytical frameworks may include but are not limited to art history, comparative literature, gender and sexuality, and considerations of the Anthropocene.
Send a 500-word abstract and brief CV to Virginia Picchietti (virginia.picchietti@scranton.edu) by 1 October 2022. All completed essays will be peer reviewed for inclusion in the volume, published in English. For all inquiries, please contact Picchietti.