Italian Studies
A valuable critical work.
Timothy C. Campbell
To understand Ferrante, you have to find her. That’s the brilliant premise behind Alessia Ricciardi’s eloquent account of Ferrante’s radical critique—not only of patriarchy but also of cruel work, sex, and power. Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet becomes the scene for Ricciardi’s reappropriation of the novels as a site for reconsidering the joys of anti-work, feminist solidarity, and world literature. One of if not the best book on Ferrante extant, Finding Ferrante is destined to become a classic.
Michael Wood
In Finding Ferrante, Ricciardi offers a lucid, imaginative, and richly informed study of all of Elena Ferrante’s work, emphasizing the crucial concept of resistance that appears throughout the enigmatic writer’s books.
David Kurnick
Alessia Ricciardi’s fascinating book offers Anglophone readers a new Ferrante: a participant in German and Italian literary traditions, a cunning theorist of realism and of the writing self, an urban cartographer, a political thinker. In expertly “situating” Ferrante’s writing in its intellectual and literary contexts, Ricciardi sets that writing in motion.
Simona Forti
Despite the numerous interpretive essays devoted to Elena Ferrante's literary work, Alessia Ricciardi's book fills a hermeneutic void. Ricciardi deciphers with great sharpness the game of mirrors and identities of the writer, including that of the pseudonym. In doing so, she succeeds in bringing to the surface a conceptual structure that remained unexplored until now. A necessary book.
Adriana Cavarero
Constructed as a literary detective story, Finding Ferrante captures the reader as its object of investigation. By revealing who is behind the pseudonym, Ricciardi explores the explosive linguistic energy of an extraordinary writer whose story-telling seductive power, like a Gramscian experiment by literary means, accounts for ‘an intimate public sphere'—one in which the ambivalent yet productive forms of trust between women encounter the generative practices and topographies of female relationality.
Comparative Critical Studies
This excellent monograph will doubtless divide opinion but should nevertheless be welcomed as an original and seriously considered interpretative effort.
Journal of Modern Italian Studies
Ricciardi sets out to examine the ‘extraordinary encounter’ between Italian and German-language literatures staged on the pages of Ferrante’s four Neapolitan Novels. She accomplishes this goal successfully, proposing a number of original interpretations and mobilizing an impressive set of analytical tools drawn from feminist philosophy and political theory.
Public Books
Ricciardi ignores the guidance of Ferrante and Frantumaglia to draw her own, refreshingly original conclusions about the Neapolitan Novels and how they fit into not just our understanding of Italian culture but also world literature.
