The Oxford Handbook of Italian Literature (In Progress) Stefano Jossa (ed.) https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197613955.001.0001 Published: 19 September 2024 Online ISBN: 9780197613986 Print ISBN: 9780197613955 Search in this book CHAPTER https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197613955.013.52 Published: 19 November 2024 Abstract Undoing Italy with Ferrante, Sapienza, Scego, and Lahiri: Transnational Approaches to Contemporary Italian Literature Alberica Bazzoni This chapter begins with the global success of Elena Ferrante’s tetralogy known as the Neapolitan Novels to sketch an alternative conguration of contemporary Italian literature based on a transnational approach. The author places Ferrante next to case studies of transnational success (Goliarda Sapienza), postcolonial narrative (Igiaba Scego), and translingual authorship (Jhumpa Lahiri) that showcase the porosity of the boundaries of a national canon. Considered together, these authors reveal and institute dierence at the very heart of Italian identity, and concomitantly place Italian literature into a transnational network of references and readerships. Reecting on diverging methodologies and disciplinary connes at play in canon formation in Italian studies in Italy and in Anglophone academia, the chapter foregrounds the categories of trauma, gender, translingualism, hybridity, and multiplicity of identity as central to the denition of a transnational corpus of contemporary literature in Italian. The chapter is divided into two parts: the rst addresses a transnational perspective in Italian studies, argues for an enlarged canon that is representative of dierence within contemporary literature in Italian, and describes the analytical categories that emerge from the application of a transnational approach to the selected hybrid corpus. The second part introduces works by Ferrante, Sapienza, Scego, and Lahiri, and oers a snapshot of the working of this approach and these categories in these authors’ production. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58209/chapter/494347139 by Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford user on 28 November 2024