Grazia Deledda’s Painterly Aesthetic

Central to Grazia Deledda’s narrative worlds are the relationships between her characters and the vast landscapes in which they move and act. The writer translates and represents her characters, her characters’ emotions, and her natural and urban landscapes with a vocabulary that is often related to the visual arts. However, although her descriptions contain the gradations of Modernist painting, beginning with Impressionism, no book-length study, and with diverse perspectives, has thus far investigated Deledda’s relationship with the visual arts and the resulting painterly aesthetic of her multicolored narratives. In this sense, Grazia Deledda’s Painterly Aesthetic provides an articulated literary panorama of Deledda’s novels and short stories through a discourse that is situated between literature and pictorial art. Inspired by these two cardinal points, the analyses are undertaken by contributors who have a profound awareness of an epochal change and work in different disciplines. One year from the centenary of her receipt of the Nobel Prize, the contributors investigate the connections, consonances, and differences between Grazia Deledda’s oeuvre and other works inside this panorama to verify a possible unity of purpose. At the same time, they seek to ascertain whether these connections can corroborate and exalt the choices that the Sardinian writer made to free herself from the constraints of a hostile environment.

Angela Guiso is an independent scholar, literary critic, and author of many works.

Virginia A. Picchietti is professor of Italian and women’s and gender studies at the University of Scranton.