Grazia Deledda’s Dance of Modernity

Grazia Deledda (1871-1936) was the author of many influential novels and remains one of the most significant Italian women writers of her time. However, critics tend to pigeonhole her works into convenient literary categories and to ignore the uniqueness of her style and voice. Grazia Deledda’s Dance of Modernity offers a timely and thought-provoking interpretation of this Nobel laureate, examining her work in the context of European philosophical and literary modernity.

Margherita Heyer-Caput takes a philosophical and philological approach in order to provide a reassessment of Deledda’s position in the literary canon. At the same time, she raises the larger issue of the status of allegedly ’regional’ or ’minor’ literatures within the context of Italian modernity. Dealing with four novels representative of Deledda’s vast corpus, Heyer-Caput addresses and dismantles elements of regionalismo, verismo, and decadentismo, labels with which Deledda’s works are regularly associated. This is the first volume to introduce some of Deledda’s overlooked texts to an Anglophone audience. It invites readers to overturn established critical categories and to question margin-centre hierarchies both in the broad context of literary modernity and the narrower frame of Deledda’s writing.

Grazia Deledda’s Dance of Modernity is a highly original and innovative interpretation of Deledda’s narrative in philosophical perspective, which also includes the study of textual variations and considers cultural history in Italy during the early twentieth century. It is a much-needed examination of an important writer and how she managed to construct her own literary and gender identity in the context of modernity.