Finding Ferrante. Authorship and the politics of world literature, by Alessia Ricciardi

Abstract

Ferrante Studies is a recent yet burgeoning field encompassing interdisciplinary and transnational scholarship from Italy, Europe, and the anglophone world. A brief history and a brief definition are essential for the contextualization of the book under review. Ferrante Studies can be defined as the global engagement with Elena Ferrante’s writing through the lens of different methodologies, disciplines, and interpretive frameworks. It is distinguished by its participants’ sustained dialogue with the robust criticism on the subject in both English and Italian and their capacity to read and cite her novels in the original (Milkova 2020). The timeline of Ferrante Studies spans three main periods: (1) before 2011 – that is, before the publication of the tetralogy L’amica geniale when we see a small number of articles and dissertation and book chapters appear in Italian and English as early as 1999; (2) the period 2012– 2014 when many more essays on Ferrante’s earlier novels and on L’amica geniale appear; and (3) after the success of the tetralogy beginning in 2015 with numerous articles, book chapters, monographs and edited volumes being published. Moreover, beginning in early 2015 we see conference panels and seminars on Elena Ferrante which give rise to entire conferences in Italy (2017) and in England (2019) dedicated to her works. Today, Ferrante scholarship in English and Italian includes several seminal monographs, edited volumes, and special journal issues, and a great number of articles, doctoral dissertations, and master’s theses, as evidenced by the compre-hensive bibliography compiled and updated regularly by the