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Verso un nuovo arcipelago mediterraneo: le isole di Grazia Deledda, Fabrizia Ramondino, Anna Maria Ortese

Abstract

Islands have traditionally been considered by canonical male authors as subordinated to the mainland. They have been alternately depicted as wild spaces to be tamed, civilized and colonized, or as sites of imprisonment. Often they appear as desirable, utopian elsewheres where one can escape from the real world and its turmoil. In my dissertation Verso un nuovo arcipelago mediterraneo: le isole di Grazia Deledda, Fabrizia Ramondino, Anna Maria Ortese (“Toward a New Mediterranean Archipelago: the Islands of Grazia Deledda, Fabrizia Ramondino, and Anna Maria Ortese”), I discuss and connect ― as in a kind of alternative feminist archipelago ― literary texts about Italy’s islands by canonical and lesser-known Italian women authors, including Grazia Deledda on Sardinia; Fabrizia Ramondino on Ventotene; and Anna Maria Ortese on the imaginary island of Oca�a. My archipelago expands progressively in the dissertation’s three chapters, addressing questions about Italian identity first, then European identity, and, finally, global identity. I combine textual analysis with critical perspectives from gender and feminist theory, Mediterranean thought, postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and the new field of island studies. My dissertation shows how women authors have highlighted surprisingly positive, nuanced and politically productive dimensions of the island’s space and symbolic potential. I demonstrate that the work on islands by Italian women writers subverts the binary oppositions of island/mainland, inside/outside, and closed/open in order to create, instead, a new Mediterranean archipelago that reimagines physical, social, and political boundaries.

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