Anna Banti and the (Im)possibility of Love
Author: Wissia Fiorucci
Date Of Publication: Sep 2010
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-2336-4
Isbn: 1-4438-2336-8
This book looks into Banti’s stance on Italian feminism, with a specific focus on her interpretation of the concept of “equality” as well as of “sexual difference”. An analysis of a novel, A Piercing Cry (1981), and two short stories, The Women Are Dying (1951) and Je vous écris d’un pays lointain (1971), explores the aforementioned issues. The book also deals to some extent with the most famous of Banti’s works, the magnum opus Artemisia (1947). Because A Piercing Cry is a source of autobiographical elements, which therefore are particularly significant, the conclusions drawn from this novel are later applied to The Women Are Dying and Je vous écris d’un pays lointain. Certainly, A Piercing Cry expresses Banti’s faith in difference as being that which can preserve woman’s identity. By declaring “I am a woman writer”, she distances herself from a feminism of equality that, not without oscillations, she had supported throughout Artemisia. In so doing, she embraces a feminism of difference by adopting this concept herself. Drawing on these considerations, the book argues that in both The Women Are Dying, and in Je vous écris d’un pays lointain, Banti intended to support a personally elaborated and ante-litteram “feminism of difference”.

Wissia Fiorucci is co-editor and founding member of the international research journal Skepsi. She is currently undertaking a PhD in Italian at the University of Kent. Her thesis deals with interpretations of feminine authority in the works of Grazia Deledda, Masimo Bontempelli, Anna Banti and Giancarlo Pastore.

“In this focused presentation of three of Anna Banti’s works (A Piercing Cry of 1981, Le donne muoiono (The Women are Dying of 1951) and Je vous écris d’un pays lointain (I Write to you from a Faraway Land of 1971)), Wissia Fiorucci sets out to examine Anna Banti’s representations of her male and female characters and their capacity for relationships, through the lens of Banti’s sometimes equivocal, and changing, relationship with feminisms and with the feminist movement (particularly in the Italian context).

A Piercing Cry is analysed here in its autobiographical dimensions; and, in Fiorucci’s view, the protagonist’s recognition of herself as ‘a woman writer’ encapsulates Banti’s recognition of the significance of sexual difference. Here Fiorucci draws ably on Adriana Cavarero’s theoretical writings on sexual difference to illustrate similarities between her thought and that of Banti. The analysis of The Women are Dying deals with ‘otherness’ as a characteristic of both women and explores Banti’s representation of otherness here through the lens of the 1970 manifesto of Rivolta femminile to interesting effect. Love for, and connectedness to, the Other proves crucial in this reading. Finally, Fiorucci’s incisive reading of Je vous écris shows how Banti problematises notions of equality, and its potentially terrifying annihilation of all differences. Again, connectedness and love for the Other are privileged here. Part and parcel of the exploration of difference, too, resides in Banti’s very modern concern for identity and how that might be defined. Through an insightful and theoretically astute analysis of these works by Banti, Fiorucci invites us to consider her anew, and differently.”

—Ursula Fanning, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies, School of Languages and Literatures, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland

Price Uk Gbp: 34.99
Price Us Usd: 52.99

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