Ferrante Unframed

The global visibility of Elena Ferrante in both mainstream and scholarly spheres has firmly established the author as a powerful voice in contemporary World Literature. Despite Ferrante’s international success, however, her novels have not thus far been admitted into the canon of Italian literature. «Ferrante Unframed» argues that Ferrante’s works deserve to be read as essential representations of twentieth-century Italian culture not just because of their literary and meta-literary richness, but even more importantly because of the way they have drawn from and influenced both high-brow and popular culture, appealing to a vast range of readers across nations, social classes, races and sexual orientations. Readers worldwide have identified with Ferrante’s female protagonists, who come of age on the margins of Southern Italian society, in lower-class Neapolitan households, and who resist those mechanisms that attempt to generate female subalternity, instead recuperating female subjectivity and the female body from the clutches of an enduringly patriarchal society.