Grazia Deledda's Painterly Aesthetic

Angela Guiso, Virginia A. Picchietti

• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781683937029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: From the Language of the Painters of the Secessione Romana to Ignacio Zuloaga’s Chromatism
• Chapter 1: From the “Anticlassical” Barbagia to the “Gerusalemme dell’arte”: The Representation of the Island in the Works of Grazia Deledda: Between Primitivism and the Aesthetics of the Secessions
• Chapter 2: Deledda, Modernism, Primitivism, and Contemporary Art
• Chapter 3: Grazia Deledda’s Landscape Writings: Ignacio Zuloaga’s Pictorial Suggestions in “L’uomo nuovo” and “Lasciare o prendere?”
• Part II: The Long Journey of Deledda’s Narratives from Impressionism to Art Déco
• Chapter 4: Impressionist Style in Deledda’s Landscapes
• Chapter 5: An Explorer’s “Soul [...] Enlightened by the Shining Art”: Grazia Deledda’s Epistemology as a Traveler Through Obse vation, Discourse, and Image
• Part III: The Chiaroscuro of Deledda’s Short Stories
• Chapter 6: The Space Between: Deledda’s Doors as Frames for Visual and Symbolic Landscapes
• Chapter 7: “La festa del Cristo” and the Practice of Forgiveness According to Grazia Deledda
• Part IV: Artistic Connections across Continents
• Chapter 8: Between Affinity and Sisterhood: Nature and Art in Grazia Deledda’s Visual Writing
• Chapter 9: Landscapes of Desolation: Philosophical Pessimism in Grazia Deledda’s Canne al vento (1913) and Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911)
• Chapter 10: Marianna Sirca, Alexandra Bergson, and Marie Tovesky Shabata: Understanding Grazia Deledda’s and Willa Cather’s Female Protagonists through Berthe Morisot’s Impressionist Paintings
• Appendix
• Index
• About the Contributors