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<p>This thesis investigates the Italian production of chick lit, a particular segment of contemporary women’s popular fiction developed in the mid 1990s in Anglophone countries. A worldwide phenomenon born out of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and the HBO TV show Sex and the City (1998), chick lit novels portray the professional, emotional and sentimental anxieties of white, middle-class, heterosexual and financially independent women in a witty and humorous tone. The arrival of chick lit and its successful translation into Italian in the late 1990s has prompted many local writers to engage with the genre, but the growing body of chick lit written in Italian and its place in the cultural and literary landscape have yet to be assessed. This thesis explores recurring themes, narrative strategies and stylistic features deployed in Italian chick lit novels not only against their Anglo-American models, but also in relation to Western popular media culture and the Italian tradition of romanzo rosa, its cultures and practices as well as its legacy. It shows the presence of distinct intertextual patterns in dealing with key generic features, such as the identification with the female protagonist and her journey toward self-empowerment, the relationship with consumerism and popular media culture, and the humorous style. This thesis also assesses the nature of chick lit as both a literary genre and a sociocultural phenomenon across countries and languages through theoretical perspectives of cultural studies and feminist theories on women’s popular culture and Western popular postfeminism.</p>
<p>This thesis investigates the Italian production of chick lit, a particular segment of contemporary women’s popular fiction developed in the mid 1990s in Anglophone countries. A worldwide phenomenon born out of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and the HBO TV show Sex and the City (1998), chick lit novels portray the professional, emotional and sentimental anxieties of white, middle-class, heterosexual and financially independent women in a witty and humorous tone. The arrival of chick lit and its successful translation into Italian in the late 1990s has prompted many local writers to engage with the genre, but the growing body of chick lit written in Italian and its place in the cultural and literary landscape have yet to be assessed. This thesis explores recurring themes, narrative strategies and stylistic features deployed in Italian chick lit novels not only against their Anglo-American models, but also in relation to Western popular media culture and the Italian tradition of romanzo rosa, its cultures and practices as well as its legacy. It shows the presence of distinct intertextual patterns in dealing with key generic features, such as the identification with the female protagonist and her journey toward self-empowerment, the relationship with consumerism and popular media culture, and the humorous style. This thesis also assesses the nature of chick lit as both a literary genre and a sociocultural phenomenon across countries and languages through theoretical perspectives of cultural studies and feminist theories on women’s popular culture and Western popular postfeminism.</p>
Sub-proletarian fights, domestic disputes, and camorrista-led aggression permeate and scar the suburban cityscape in Elena Ferrante's works. Violence and animosity, which dictate life in the Neapolitan rioni, are deeply entrenched in the local dialect, as well as in the writer's conflict-ridden portrayals of mothering and motherhood. This article proposes to analyze a fundamental tension that emerges in Ferrante's writings, which explore new notions of feminine identity and rethink fundamental aspects of gender relations and social constructs, most prominently of motherhood. These reflections, however, remain profoundly tinged by the patriarchal structures and spaces they set out to expose and subvert. A particularly productive way of approaching the tension that underpins Ferrante's textual negotiation of the feminine subject, is through a close reading of her complex depictions of maternity.More precisely, this article will analyze the intricate interplay between forms of desire and the imagery of violence, conflict, repulsion, and animosity that accompanies maternity in L'amore molesto (1992), La figlia oscura (2006), and the so-called Neapolitan novels (2011)(2012)(2013)(2014), with a specific focus on L'amica geniale (2011). 1 My reading will show how the maternal body-which appears as violating or violated in its inaccessibility, repulsive appearance, or crippled status-stands at the very center of the author's reflections on the troubled and discontinuous emergence of the female subject. Ultimately, I will show how Ferrante's complex female characters challenge normative conceptualizations of motherhood and femininity while exploring new forms of female-focused experience that undermine deeply engrained patriarchal power structures.Critical appraisals of Ferrante often single out her unforgiving portrayals of maternity, which routinely challenge the socially and religiously constructed stereotype of the nurturing, self-abnegating, and asexual mother, as one of the most unsettling and thought-provoking aspects of her work. Kate Chisholm's article in The Spectator, for instance, refers to the "brutal honesty with which Ferrante is prepared to expose the dark underside of female friendship and motherhood." 2 James Wood, on the other hand, draws attention to the "savagery with which the author attacks the themes of motherhood and womanhood," as her texts stand apart in how they indulge in "the psychic surplus, the outrageousness" of the familial dramas they expose. 3 However, I will argue that rather than constituting an eccentric feature of the author's works, Ferrante's "disturbing" conceptualizations of motherhoodand their recurrent link to animosity and violence-stand in critical dialogue with a longstanding literary and cultural tradition that constructs non-normative forms of motherhood as deviant or aberrant.
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