Elena Ferrante's Key Words

The monograph Elena Ferrante’s Key Words is the English translation (by Will Schutt, Europa Editions, New York 2019) of the volume Elena Ferrante. Parole chiave published in Italy by the publishing house e/o (Rome) in 2018. Compared to the Italian edition, the English text presents an unpublished chapter, the final Conclusion. This final chapter situates the literary form and the imagery of Elena Ferrante's quadrilogy within the contemporary global novel. The monograph maps out the themes found in the Ferrante's complete works connecting it with different disciplinary areas and analysis tools. These keywords function as an Ariadne's thread, as signal lights that can indicate the many twists and turns of Ferrante's writing and help us navigate this labyrinth. Chapter One, A Brilliant Popular Narrative, analyzes the narrative mechanism of The Neapolitan Novels and the novelty of this engaging and innovative story, which cannot be dismissed as commercial literature. Chapters Two and Three (Female Friendship and Smarginatura, Frantumaglia, Surveillance: Between Mothers and Daughters) explain how Ferrante's entire body of work has given voice to crucial features of female difference, a historical, existential, and biological otherness that rebalances the scales and rewords what we have inherited from the age-old repertoire of the male imagination and literary tradition. The final four chapters (Naples, the Urban Labyrinth; Two Languages, Emigration, and Schooling; Violence, Imagery, Disappearances, and History and Stories) dwell on the long time frame of the quartet and the fragments of history that emerge from it: Naples as a border city, a labyrinth both in and outside the straightjacket of modernity; the conflict and cross-pollination between standard language and dialect; the emancipation of new female and bilingual voices; national identity as a tale of emigration; school as a formative and alienating experience for a “second-class” female; the language of male violence and its blend of physical and symbolic domination; the dissipation of history from the 1950s through the first decade of the new millennium.