Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Chronology of Elena Ferrante’s Works and Abbreviations 1. Introduction: Elena Ferrante, World Literature, and the Work of Literary Translation World Literature and the Creation of Elena Ferrante Ferrante’s Feminine Imaginary Ferrante’s Female Genealogies The Translator as Seamstress: Figures of Translation from the Periphery to the Center Elena Ferrante as World Literature: An Overview 2. Frantumaglia and Smarginatura: The Borders of a Universal Feminine Imaginary Incisions and Inscriptions of the Body The Parameters of Frantumaglia Smarginatura in the Neapolitan Novels The “Mothers” of Smarginatura Women Who Write 3. Binding and Unbinding the Maternal Body and Voice Desire and Disgust for the Mother Conflations and Inversions: Mothers, Daughters, Dolls Enclosing the Maternal Body: Cellars, Locked Apartments, Clothes Laughing Bodies and Grotesque Gestures Dead Mothers and Corporeal Flows 4. Outside the Frame: The Aesthetics of Female Creativity and Authorship Inside the Frame: The (Nude) Female Body-as-Parts Inside the Frame: Mirrors, Collages, Still Lifes Outside the Frame: Creating a Female Artistic Legacy The Neapolitan Novels and Female Friendship, Writing, Authorship 5. Mapping Urban Feminine Topographies Walking the Streets of Topographic Memory in Troubling Love Symbolic and Literal Labyrinth in the Neapolitan Novels From Naples to Turin: Urban Itineraries of Abandonment Epilogue: Reverse Maps, Familial Objects, and Open Frames in The Lying Life of Adults Notes Works Cited Index

Promotional Information

Examines the global impact and relevance of Elena Ferrante's narratives of feminine identity.

About the Author

Stiliana Milkova Rousseva is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian at Oberlin College, USA.

Reviews

Stiliana Milkova has written a compelling and highly readable study of Ferrante’s fiction [that] is interested more than anything about what the text itself reveals about Ferrante’s poetics and politics, explaining as a result, what makes Ferrante’s texts so addictive to read and such a pleasure to analyze. This one is for the academics and casual fans alike.
*EuropeNow*

Written with remarkable competence and flair, and accompanied by a rich bibliography, Elena Ferrante as World Literature constitutes an essential reference for Ferrante scholars and an ideal textbook for any university course on Elena Ferrante in the anglophone world.
*Italian Studies*

Stiliana Milkova leads us on a tour through Ferrante’s world of women and female subjectivity, exploring the themes of mothers and daughters, friendships between women, women and their bodies, girls and their dolls, women reading and writing--and their connections from novel to novel--in a fascinating and thought-provoking way that makes us want to go back to the books with a new understanding.
*Ann Goldstein, English Translator of Elena Ferrante’s novels*

A very rich and original perspective.
*Leggendaria (trans. by Bloomsbury Academic)*

Milkova stands as a rightful successor to the Ferrantean exegetic legacy. She does not read against Ferrante, but alongside her, turning what others might perceive as an intrusive presence into a stamp of approval.
*Public Books*

Essential for exploring the urban and topographical plan of Ferrante's work.
*Bollettino '900 (trans. by Bloomsbury Academic)*

Elena Ferrante as World Literature makes a compelling argument for the exceptionality of Elena Ferrante's work as a site of entanglement of multiple cultural traditions, interdisciplinary lines of enquiry, and trans-linguistic negotiation. While engaging in productive dialogue with existing scholarship, this book proposes its own profoundly original reading of the entire Ferrante corpus. Subverting traditional discourses of motherhood and femininity by de-constructing and de-framing women's bodies, Ferrante's new subjects emerge, in Stiliana Milkova's powerful account, from the 'male cage' of patriarchal structures to build new genealogies of women as creators, authors, translators. This is a milestone in Ferrante scholarship and an essential tool for teachers and students of Ferrante's oeuvre.
*Enrica Maria Ferrara, Teaching Fellow of Italian, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and editor of Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film: Boundaries and Identity (2019)*

Stiliana Milkova masterfully leads her readers through the 'feminine labyrinth-polis' that Elena Ferrante has created. Like the figure of Ariadne that she examines, Milkova meticulously traces the rich web of motifs that generate Ferrante's 'universal feminine imaginary,' deftly accounting for the power of these novels.
*Maria Truglio, Professor of Italian and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Pennsylvania State University, USA, and author of Italian Children’s Literature and National Identity: Childhood, Melancholy, Modernity (2017)*

Elena Ferrante as World Literature descends into the depths of Ferrante's novels to trace hitherto unexplored continuities between them and their dialogue with texts of other nations on themes and issues of transnational significance. Milkova's brilliant analysis sanctions Ferrante's socially, culturally, and spatially profoundly Italian stories as World Literature, thus providing scholarly foundations for an understanding of their high capacity for circulation across national borders and their resounding global success. This book will not only be an indispensable tool for scholars and students of Italian, comparative, and world literature worldwide; it will also appeal to the common readers and enthusiasts of Ferrante's fiction.
*Adalgisa Giorgio, Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies, University of Bath, UK, and co-editor of Motherhood in Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Europe (2017)*