Deledda, Grazia (21 September 1871 - 15 August 1936)
Grazia Deledda (21 September 1871 - 15 August 1936)Stefania Lucamante Catholic University of AmericaandE. Ann Matter University of PennsylvaniaLettersBibliographyBiographiesReferences
Grazia Deledda (21 September 1871 - 15 August 1936)Stefania Lucamante Catholic University of AmericaandE. Ann Matter University of PennsylvaniaLettersBibliographyBiographiesReferences Source for information on Deledda, Grazia (21 September 1871 - 15 August 1936): Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature, Part 1 dictionary.
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Grazia Deledda (21 September 1871 - 15 August 1936)

Stefania Lucamante

Catholic University of America

and

E. Ann Matter

University of Pennsylvania

Letters

Bibliography

Biographies

References

Papers

Deledda: Autobiographical Statement

1926 Nobel Prize in Literature Presentation Speech

This entry has been expanded by Matter from Lucamante’sDeledda entry in DLB 264: Italian Prose Writers, 1900-1945.

BOOKS: Nell’azzurro (Milan: Trevisani, 1890);

Stella d’Oriente, as Ilia di Saint-Ismael (Cagliari: Avvenire di Sardegna, 1891);

Fior di Sardegna (Rome: Perino, 1891);

Amore regale (Rome: Perino, 1892);

La regina delle tenebre (Turin: Orsiglia, 1892);

Anime oneste (Milan: Cogliati, 1893);

Racconti sardi (Sassari: Dessí, 1894);

Tradizioni popolari di Nuoro in Sardegna (Roma: Forzani & Senato, 1894);

La via del male (Turin: Speirani, 1896);

Il tesoro (Turin: Speirani, 1897);

L’ospite (Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1897);

Paesaggi sardi (Turin: Speirani, 1897);

I tre talismani (Palermo: Sandron, 1899);

N.S. del buon consiglio: Leggenda sarda (Palermo: Sandron, 1899);

La giustizia (Turin: Speirani, 1899);

Giaffah (Palermo: Sandron, 1899);

Le disgrazie che può cagionare il denaro (Palermo: Sandron,1899);

Le tentazioni (Milan: Cogliati, 1899);

Il vecchio della montagna (Turin: Roux & Viarengo, 1900);

Dopo il divorzio (Turin: Roux & Viarengo, 1902); republished as Naufraghi in porto (Milan: Treves, 1920); translated by Maria Hornor Lansdale as After the Divorce: A Romance (New York: Holt, 1905);

La regina delle tenebre (Milan: Agnelli, 1902);

Elias Portolu (Turin & Rome: Roux & Viarengo, 1903); translated by Martha King (London: Quartet, 1992);

Cenere (Rome: Ripamonti & Colombo, 1904); translated by Helen Hester Colvill as Ashes (Cenere): A Sardinian Story (London & New York: John Lane, 1908);

I giuochi della vita (Milan: Treves, 1905);

Nostalgie (Rome: Nuova Antologia, 1905);

Amori moderni (Rome: Voghera, 1907);

L’ombra delpassato (Rome: Nuova Antologia, 1907?);

L’edera (Rome: Nuova Antologia, 1908);

Ilnonno (Rome: Nuova Antologia, 1908);

IInostropadrone (Milan: Treves, 1910);

Sino al confine (Milan: Treves, 1910);

Nel deserto (Milan: Treves, 1911);

Chiaroscuro (Milan: Treves, 1912);

Colombi e sparvieri (Milan: Treves, 1912);

L’edera: Dramma in tre atti, by Deledda and Camillo Antona-Traversi (Milan: Treves, 1912);

Canne al vento (Milan: Treves, 1913); translated by King as Reeds in the Wind (New York: Italica, 1999);

Le colpe altrui (Milan: Treves, 1914);

Marianna Sirca (Milan: Treves, 1915);

Il fanciullo nascosto (Milan: Treves, 1916);

L’incendio nell’uliveto (Milan: Treves, 1918);

Il ritorno del figlio e La bambina rubata (Milan: Treves, 1919);

La madre (Milan: Treves, 1920); translated by Mary G. Steegman as The Woman and the Priest (London: Cape, 1922); translation republished as The Mother (New York: Macmillan, 1923; London: Cape, 1928);

La grazia: Dramma pastorale in tre atti, by Deledda, Claudio Guastallo, and Vicentino Michetti (Milan: Ricordi, 1921);

Cattive compagnie (Milan: Treves, 1921);

Il segreto dell’uomo solitario (Milan: Treves, 1921);

Il Dio dei viventi (Milan: Treves, 1922);

Il flauto nel bosco (Milan: Treves, 1923);

La danza della collana: Romanzo, seguito dal bozzetto drammatico “A sinistra” (Milan: Treves, 1924);

La fuga in Egitto (Milan: Treves, 1925);

Cani, gatti, pulcini ed altri animali: Scene rustiche (Palermo & Rome, 1926);

Il sigillo d’amore (Milan: Treves, 1926);

Il cieco di Gerico (Rome: Nuova Antologia, 1927);

Annalena Bilsini (Milan: Treves, 1927);

Il vecchio e i fanciulli (Milan: Treves, 1928);

Il dono di Natale (Milan: Treves, 1930);

La casa del poeta (Milan: Treves, 1930);

Il paese del vento (Milan: Treves, 1931);

La vigna sul mare (Milan: Treves, 1932);

Sole d’estate (Milan: Treves, 1933);

L’argine (Milan: Treves, 1934);

La chiesa della solitudine (Milan: Treves, 1936); translated by E. Ann Matter as The Church of Solitude (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002);

Cosima (Milan: Treves, 1937); translated by King (New York: Italica, 1988);

Versi e prose giovanili, edited by Antonio Scano (Milan: Treves, 1938);

Il cedro del Libano (Milan: Garzanti, 1939).

Collections: Romanzi e novelle, Omnibus, 5 volumes, edited by Emilio Cecchi (Milan: Mondadori, 1941-1969);

Scritti scelti (Milan: Mondadori, 1959)—comprises Canne al vento, Un dramma, La festa del Cristo, Chiaroscuro, La palma, and Contratto;

Opere scelte, 2 volumes, edited by Eurialo De Michelis, I classici contemporanei italiani (Milan: Mondadori, 1964);

Romanzi e novelle, edited by Natalino Sapegno, I meridiani (Milan: Mondadori, 1971);

I grandi romanzi, edited by Marta Savini (Rome: Newton, 1993)—comprises Il vecchio della montagna, Elias Portolu, Cenere, L’edera, Colombi e sparvieri, Canne al vento, Marianna Sirca, La madre, Annalena Bilsini, and Cosima.

Editions in English: Chiaroscuro and Other Stories, translated by Martha King (London: Quartet, 1994);

After the Divorce, translated by Susan Ashe (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995);

Elias Portolu, translated by King (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995);

Ashes, translated by Janice M. Kozma (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004).

OTHER: Adalgiso Lanfranchi, Mirandolina: Romanzo per giovinette, preface by Deledda (Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1912);

Nicola Pascazio, Dalla trincea alla reggia (combattendo con la Brigata Sassari): impressionidi un ferito, preface by Deledda (Milan: Societa Editoriale Italiana, 1916);

Le piú belle pagine di Silvio Pellico, selected by Deledda (Milan: Treves, 1923);

Il libro della terza elementare: letture, religione, storia, geografia, aritmetica, compiled by Deledda (Rome: La libreria dello Stato, 1930).

SELECTED PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS-UNCOLLECTED: “Sangue sardo,” Ultima moda (1888);

“Remigia Helder,” Ultima moda (1888);

“Memorie di Fernanda,” Ultima moda (1888);

“La pesca miracolosa,” La Sardegna (1889);

“Il castello di San Loor,” La Sardegna (1889).

Grazia Deledda was the only Italian woman—and, after Selma Lagërlof of Sweden, the second of only nine women writers in the twentieth century—to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1926. Her name thus stands out in the Italian canon as a significant example for all the female writers who have succeeded her. Her fiction is profoundly rooted in Sardinian ethics and history and expands on the universal themes of love, money, death, and family relationships.

She was born Grazia Maria Cosima Deledda on 21 September 1871 in Nuoro on the island of Sardinia. The daughter of wealthy landowners Giovanni Antonio and Francesca Cambosu Deledda, she was, as she described herself in the autobiographical work Cosima (1937; translated, 1988), “una bambina bruna, con gli occhi castanei, limpidi e grandi, le mani e i piedi minuscoli, vestita di un grembiale grigiastro con le tasche, con le calze di grosso cotone grezzo e le scarpe rustiche a lacci, più paesana che borghese” (a dark-haired child, serious, with big, bright brown eyes, with minuscule hands and feet, dressed in a gray smock with pockets, with heavy cotton socks and rustic lace shoes, more peasant than bourgeois). Giovanni Deledda—a good, gentle, and understanding man, as well as a dialectal poet with great faith in the good nature of people—died in November 1892, after which the family faced financial problems. Neither of Grazia’s two brothers, one mentally ill and the other a spendthrift, was able to restore the original wealth accumulated by their astute father. Yet, from Nuoro, which was known for its literary associations and even called the “Athens of Sardinia,” Deledda managed to establish connections with writers and editors in Rome, even “A costo di rubare un litro d’olio per poter comprare spedire le sue novelle a Roma” (at the cost of stealing a liter of oil in order to mail her novellas to the Continent), as she wrote in Cosima.

Considering the time in which the author lived and, more specifically, the intense isolation of Nuoro from the mainland, Deledda had an adequate if somewhat atypical education; she attended a conventional school until the fourth grade and also received private tutoring in Italian, French, Latin, and readings of her choice. Her early output reflects ample influence from the most popular and readily available feuilletons and popular novels. The young Deledda read the works of the most famous Italian writers of the day, including Gabriele D’Annunzio, Edmondo De Amicis, Antonio Fogazzaro, Giovanni Verga, and Ada Negri. Later she read the writings of Alessandro Manzoni, Sir Walter Scott, Silvio Pellico, and Carlo Goldoni, as well as of Russian authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol, Maksim Gor’ky, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. She had great admiration particularly for Dostoevsky and often remarked on his ability to portray human passions in their most contradictory and unexpected moments.

Deledda was writing and publishing by her early twenties. She contributed to several newspapers and periodicals—namely La Sardegna and Vita Sarda-and her short stories were collected in Nell’azzurro (1890, Into the Blue), Racconti sardi (1894, Sardinian Short Stories), L’ospite (1897, The Guest), and Le tentazioni (1899, The Temptations). Like the works of Luigi Pirandello, these short stories introduced themes that she resumed in her subsequent, longer narratives. Expanding on subjects first presented in short-story form, her novels focus on the torment of passion, a deterministic view of life, a much-stressed morality, the representation of crimes or transgressions for which one must be held accountable, and emotions such as remorse, desperation, and hope for redemption. But, as Natalino Sapegno has argued, as quoted by Giuliana Sanguinetti Katz in “Immagini e strutture in un racconto della Deledda” (1994), a superstition—that the condition of being is related to magic and nature—renders Deledda’s sense of morality for her characters quite opaque. For Mario Massaiu, on the other hand, in “Il folklore sardo nell’opera di Grazia Deledda” in Sardegna in prospettiva euromediterranea (1977), the writer’s ideological involvement in the archaic situation of her fellow Sardinians is expressed in her works of fiction through her skillful juxtaposition of folkloric material. Sapegno also diverges from the interpretation of Angelo Pellegrino, as presented in “Deledda Grazia” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, volume 36 (1988), who maintains the thesis of Deledda’s systematic disengagement from the current events of the war—that during wartime she conceived of her stories in a sort of “historical vacuum.” As Sanguinetti Katz points out again in “Immagini e strutture in un racconto della Deledda,” Sapegno was always convinced of Deledda’s ability to interpret the relics of the past history of her region, in which folklore and mythology play a great role, as well as her ability to look toward a twentieth century of progress and inventions.

In 1894 Tradizioni popolari di Nuoro in Sardegna (Popular Traditions of Nuoro in Sardinia) was published, and from then on Deledda’s research on popular culture and folklore accentuated her fascination with her regional background; with few exceptions, Sardinia and the everyday life of Sardinians served as the topics of her works. Though confined in her small Sardinian town, Deledda was, from an early age, profoundly conscious of the particular way that she perceived her life in Nuoro and interpreted it in fiction. In the fall of 1899 Deledda accepted an invitation to visit Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, and for the first time left the microcosm of Nuoro. As she recalled later in Cosima, she was impressed by the different landscape that met her eyes at the exit of the Cagliari train station. The palm trees, the sea, and the openness of the city imbued Cagliari with an almost exotic atmosphere, especially in comparison with the austere, enclosed, and still primitive world of Nuoro.

In 1900, after a brief engagement, Deledda married Palmiro Madesani, a government employee whom she had met in Cagliari, and they moved soon afterward to Rome, where he was reassigned. Her encounter with Madesani marked a defining moment in her life, for the marriage fulfilled certain of her needs at the time. It satisfied a social necessity for a woman of her age (twenty-nine); marriage saved her the “embarrassment” of becoming a zitella (spinster) who, even worse, nourished artistic ambitions. It also met her ambition to leave Nuoro and its suffocating environment. In the context of her fiction, a relocation to Rome—the city of Deledda’s dreams—often occasions for her characters a psychological rebirth or the onset of a new, artistic life. Her characters almost always perceive a move to Rome as a turning point in their lives, although the city represents more often than not the corruption and temptations of the modern world, versus the patriarchal nature of Sardinian society. As a husband, Madesani was a faithful companion and became even more so in his eventual role as her literary agent, taking care of her communications with publishers and with the press.

From 1895 onward, Deledda published novels of myth, archaic destinies, and tragic misfortunes. The births of her two sons with Madesani—Sardus in 1900 and Franz in 1903—did not interfere with her prolific production, which continued steadily with the publication of one novel a year until her death. In her works she describes a world dictated mainly by passions and almost pagan in its outlook. As in the fiction of Giovanni Verga, considered the most significant writer of verismo in Italian literature, in Deledda’s novels and short stories the opening pages usually project an unhappy scenario and almost immediately display the predestined victim and the setting in which the story will develop. The wild and relatively unexplored Sardinian inland frequently provides the background of her narratives; in the short stories she constructs her characters, both male and female, according to a pattern of repetition, and they recur later in the novels in what is best described as a set categorization. For example, the characters and the settings from her first short story, “Vita silvana” (1884, Life in the Woods), appear in subsequent works such as Elias Portolu (1903; translated, 1992), L’edera (1908, The Ivy), Canne al vento (1913; translated as Reeds in the Wind, 1999), Marianna Sirca (1915), and La madre (1920, The Mother; translated as The Woman and the Priest, 1922).

Although descriptions of Sardinian society infuse her narratives, Deledda does not provide the reader with historical details of any sort. Yet, no worthwhile discussion of her major works can commence without an understanding of the geopolitical and historical context in which she wrote them. In defining the physical borders of “her” Sardinia—that is, not the island as a whole or even as the spatial expanse of her fiction but, rather, the Sardinia that lies close to her heart—she enables the reader to visualize the inner core of this captivating isle located in the center of the Mediterranean Sea. Sardinia is the land of the Nuraghes, the prehistoric agglomerates where life began and prospered thousands of years before the Moors and the Catalans colonized them. Deledda faithfully, if evocatively, renders in both short and long narrative works the harsh landscape of the Nuorese region—the pinnacled mountains of the Gennargentu, the little villages that lie at their base, and the pieces of land, typically cultivated with olive trees, known in the Logudorese dialect as tancas. She writes of a setting in which life unfolds according to passion; in terms of their nature and way of life, Sardinians reflected an ancestral, pre-Christian culture that was obviously remote from the modernization already in process in the coastal parts of the island and in the “upwardly mobile” towns of Sassari and Cagliari. In Deledda’s day Nuoro had scarcely more than six thousand inhabitants, and in her fiction Sardinia remains—along with its peripheral areas—an island “within” an island, where passions, social divisions, and inequities interfere with progress and modern civilization.

She viewed the process of assimilation attempted on the island by the Piedmontese regime, based in Turin, in terms that parallel those expressed by Antonio Gramsci regarding the question of Southern Italy. As Gramsci wrote in his Il Risorgimento (1949), the role of Piedmont was similar to that of a political party directing the efforts of previously segregated classes throughout Italy, thus exercising a form of “dittatura senza egemonia” (dictatorship without hegemony). For Deledda, the rule of the island by the government of Turin marked a heavy imposition, both political and economic, upon Sardinians; they faced a continual battle against the external power of Piedmont that reminded them incessantly of their oppression by the Moors and the Catalans in previous eras. Given this context, the banditi in Deledda’s fiction are outlaws, not surprisingly, who are forced to find refuge in the caves of the Supramonte and Gennargentu (located in central Sardinia) by an outsider’s judicial system, that of Turin, which does not understand the unspoken laws of the island and its system of justice. Moreover, the banditi are not only enslaved men but also padroni, landowners who—in order to sustain their code of honor and, paradoxically, their family’s feuds—kill an adversary and are then forced to leave the village for fear of an “iniquitous” trial, which commonly brings about starvation and dishonor for their whole family.

These banditi in Deledda’s fiction become symbolic and typified characters that reify the perennial struggle between obedience to power and the desire to oppose wrongful laws with inner strength—laws resulting from the rational decisions of the invader. The banditi are considered outlaws, because their own “primitive” culture does not correspond to the laws of the colonizers. According to the dictates of Sardinian society, however, they are not outlaws. In Deledda’s novels the banditi continue visiting friends and relatives in their home villages despite public displays of ostracism against them. Adhering to a code of honor, these men generally refrain from robbing churches, but when they commit such a crime, they are perceived as outlaws in the eyes of their own community as well.

The clash between Sardinian culture and the cultural hegemony of the Piedmontese produced acutely oppressive financial sanctions and laws for the islanders—as exemplified by the ademprivi, a tax imposed by the Turin government of 1865, which ignited the su connottu (back to tradition) riots of 1868, protesting the end of traditional communal land use. The Piedmontese failed to understand both the Sardinian economy, which was based largely on stock raising and extensive agriculture, and the millenary cooperation between the landowners and the shepherds, who raised their stock on these lands; this inability to grasp the central features of Sardinian livelihood only escalated as a result of an 1869 law on ground wheat. Unable to transform the laws of the community into laws relating to property, the Sardinian economy began to falter, as Neria De Giovanni describes in her book Come leggere “Canne al vento” di Grazia Deledda (1993, How to Read Grazia Deledda’s Reeds of the Wind). Deledda accurately portrays the decline of the wealthy pastori (shepherds) in her novels of Sardinia and shows how the rising number of pastori forced to become banditi was related to the heavy land taxes imposed by the central government—which expropriated the landowners’ property when they failed to pay.

Deledda’s stories take place in an immemorial time, where the flocks and the harvest still determine the spatial and temporal “coordinates” of a people. Details of the customs of cheesemaking and of the roasting of porchetto (baby pig), for example, evoke a primordial existence that spatially and temporally departs from the industrialization and progress elsewhere, particularly on the mainland. The inner feelings of the characters, such as their economic and moral anguish in being perdenti (losers), in Verga’s sense of the word, denote some of the emotional repercussions of the contrast between their simple way of life on the island and life on the mainland. Deledda hints that only nature-through its positive as well as negative effects on humans and with its sense of pity and remission—can regulate island life. Initially, she followed the deterministic theses of Alberto Niceforo’s La delinquenza in Sardegna (1897, Delinquency in Sardinia), which gave a genetic reason for criminality in Sardinian culture; Niceforo asserted that Sardinian fathers passed the gene for crime on to their sons.

Deledda’s works are also intensely grounded in the superstitions that infuse regional folktales and in certain local myths, such as the ones that surround the tombs of giants, the janas (witches), and the houses of fairies; these myths are also connected to actual geographic sites—especially to those hills, mountains, and rivers on the island that are closely linked to the Nuraghes era. Massaiu has long analyzed the folkloric component in Deledda’s work, stating again in “II folklore sardo nell’opera di Grazia Deledda” that

la curiosità erudita, il dato etnografico sono ancora presenti, anzi sono presenti con frequenza e forse con intensità maggiore che nell’opera giovanile, ma nell’opera d’arte matura (approssimativamente a partire da Elias Portolu) sono assunti nella vitale materia d’arte, in quanto perennitá di valori.

(the erudite curiosity, the ethnographic data are still present, are indeed present with great frequency and, perhaps, with greater intensity in her adult work than in her earlier years, but in the works of her maturity [starting approximately with Elias Portolu] they are assumed within the artistic material, so as to show the perennial meaning of their values.)

In addition, features of verismo, the literary movement that influenced Deledda’s first period of Sardinian narratives, surface in several ways in her fiction. The characters speak in Deledda’s Logudorese dialect, and much of their speech, upon closer reading, in fact reveals a syntax that is preeminently Sardinian rather than Italian. The frequent use of dialectal terms and Sardinian surnames emphasizes the authenticity of the characters in the stories. The importance of land as the sole form of possession is another theme that relates Deledda’s work to verismo. Quarrels about the land and its passage to the next generation in the family often set a plot in motion. The regional settings of Deledda’s fiction can actually still be found on a current map of Sardinia and depict the travels of characters such as Felix of Canne al vento.

The private homes of the Nuoresi, the inhabitants of Nuoro, and the tancas, denoting the lands that they own, are segregated; they are unconnected to any kind of urban environment, such as the piazzas, the city halls, and the markets that are usually found in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian fiction. According to Luca Pinna in La famiglia esclusiva (1971), the only social structure remaining in Sardinia is the family: “il nucleo familiare in Sardegna... essere considerato come I’unica struttura sociale entro la quale le persone soddisfano tutte le loro attese economiche di collaborazione e di cooperazione, oltre che affettive” (the nuclear family in Sardinia... may be considered the only social structure within which people satisfy their needs for cooperation and collaboration, along with sentimental ones). Members of such tight family nuclei attach a higher value to their goods than to other people’s things. Consequently, the house of the family is a space the force of which is exclusively centripetal and prevents the members of the family therein from reaching out for help, since no one from the outside is better than those who live within the walls of the house. The shut windows of a house, to which she alludes in her novels of Sardinia, prevent people from gazing into and thus invading the privacy of a family’s home. They in effect stand for the Sardinians’ innate sense of privacy and fear of interference in one’s life. This space is where Deledda’s characters err in their often tragic lives. Only late in her career does she turn the tragic natural setting of the island into a bucolic and serene backdrop, as seen in the works that take place in her husband’s region, the Padania.

Elias Portolu, which was first serialized in Nuova Antologia from August to October 1900 before publication as a book, firmly anchors Deledda’s creative and poetic world in her homeland of Sardinia and was the first of her novels to do so. The novel relates the story of the Portolu family from the day Elias, the youngest son of Zia Annedda (Aunt Annedda) and Zio Berte (Uncle Berte) Portolu, returns from the Continente, the mainland of Italy; Elias is newly released after several years in prison for theft, a sentence that he feels was unjust. On the first page of the book Deledda compares his long absence from the island to a frequent reason for travel among Sardinian men—the pursuit of a proper education on the mainland. In her view, these absences create a sense of displacement and alienation in such men, for departure from the motherland means a temporary deracination, even in the case of young Sardinians who leave for the purpose of studying in Rome. She describes Elias as a man whose skin has been made so fair and delicate from his imposed inertia in the prison that one of Zio Annedda’s friends comments: “é bianco come una ragazza” (he is as white as a girl). This comment lends the character a sexual ambiguity at an early stage of the novel—an ambiguity that Deledda enhances a few pages later through Elias’s own retelling of the simple work that the prisoners were given in jail: he calls his labor “lavoretti manuali da calzolaio, o da donnicciuola!” (little manual jobs for a cobbler, or a little woman). In her fiction she typically associates infantile and feminine traits with the transgressor. As Ada Testaferri states in her contribution to Donna: Women in Italian Culture (1989), “questa debolezza iniziale lo pre-disporrebbe dunque a un comportamento diverso... rivela da parte del soggetto un rapporto di dipendenza dalla famiglia, e di immaturità.... Il destino del soggetto dipende dalla soluzione data al problema etico; attraverso esso, II soggetto aspira alia maturazione” (the initial weakness would predispose him to a different behavior... also showing lack of maturity in his relationship with the family.... The subject’s destiny depends on the solution given to the ethical problem; and it is only this way that he can aspire to maturation).

Deledda sharply contrasts Elias’s feminine traits with the speech of Zio Berte. Zio Berte’s way of talking stresses the significance and influence of men in a house because of the continuity they bestow on the family. His speech also emphasizes the necessity for these individuals to show submission and reverence to paternal figures, thus confirming their role as economic providers for the family. The relationship between father and son is always perceived in hierarchical terms, with the father intended also as the master of his children. A mother is, instead, a mere housekeeper who, at the moment of her death—as in L’incendio nell’uliveto (1918, The Fire in the Olive Grove)—passes on her keys to the prospective wife of her son as a symbol of domestic legacy and sole power in a patriarchal society.

Scandal is the ostracizing factor that the tight family unit in Elias Portolu cannot abide. It disrupts the source of serenity and balance that the family’s own inner energy as a whole provides to each member. After his return, Elias must take another journey, albeit a psychological one, of internal growth and suffering, removing him from the scandal of loving Maddalena, the young woman already promised to his brother Pietro. Elias Portolu was well received as a novel that explored issues of morality.

Deledda’s first great novel, Cenere (1904; translated as Ashes (Cenere): A Sardinian Story, 1908), is an oedipal narrative that starts with the seduction of Olí, a young and beautiful girl. After Olí gives birth out of wedlock to a son, Anania, she leaves without revealing her destination, and the child is raised by his natural father, a well-to-do landowner, and by the father’s wife, a good-hearted woman. Together they take care of Anania, who, like many young men in Deledda’s Sardinia, goes to Rome to pursue his studies, thanks to his parents’ benevolence and financial assistance. Yet, the trauma of his abandonment by Olí constantly jeopardizes Anania’s chances for success: his attempt at finding his mother, which signals that he wishes to discover his heritage, ultimately ends in his ruin. Deledda suggests that passion leads to Olí’s own ruin; commencing her youth with the betrayal of Anania’s father, she ends her life violently. The last scene of the novel depicts her suicide: as a scapegoat, or a sacrificial lamb, Olí cuts her throat to purify her son from the guilt of illegitimacy that binds them together. Afterward, Anania finds ashes in the charm he has worn since the time of his birth. That his life is forever marred by the initial, original mistake of his mother plays out Deledda’s conviction that the world—Sardinian society in particular—does not allow for forgiveness.

The unconsciously incestuous desire of Anania to find his natural mother is expressed, according to Vittorio Spinazzola in his article for Problemi (1973), in the young man’s will to submit her to his own protective supremacy. Yet, Anania feels hate against his mother, and he renounces—rather than experiences—in a morbidly destructive way, the typical rites of sexual initiation. As Anna Dolfi writes in her book Grazia Deledda (1979), the incest taboo as a perennial longing for childhood constitutes, in the context of class conflict, the main theme of the novel. Anania is aware of his actual provenance, and though trying with his law studies to reach a better status, he also realizes that he will never be able to speak or behave as a person of a class different from the one of his biological origins. Marilyn Migiel asserts in her contribution to the Stanford Italian Review (1985) that “Education as any force leading to upward social mobility is associated in Cenere with the diabolical”; that is, education spoils the human resources in the individual, who is only concerned with the social aspects of his studies. Anania finds some salvation and liberation only in death—his mother’s death. The devilish, tormented side of him, at which Deledda hints all along in the novel, jibes with the tragedy of Olí’s suicide.

The end of Cenere suggests an uncertain future for Anania. On the one hand, the ability of man to control his destiny is limited by hereditary characteristics, implying that Anania is condemned to remain in the immobile waters of primitive Sardinian society. On the other, Deledda’s characterization of Olí manifests the everlasting ability of women to put their children before anything else, even themselves, thereby hinting at hopes for Anania’s future. The lack of a resolute ending gives Cenere, like Colombie sparvieri (1912, Doves and Falcons) and Elias Portolu, an open structure that is further accentuated by the travel motif. As Giorgio Bárberi Squarotti asserts in his article “La tecnica e la struttura del romanzo deleddiano” (1975, The Technique and Structure of the Deleddian Novel), Deledda is one of a handful of Italian writers who convey travel, or the journey, whether physical or psychological, as an experience of expiation for a character: in an act of self-punishment, Olí gives up her child in Sardinia and departs, wandering the island with itinerant beggars until Anania finds her again; Elias’s first trip away from the island takes him to prison, while the scandal of desiring Maddalena evolves into a psychological journey that results in his joining the priesthood; and in Canne alvento, Efix goes on a pilgrimage through the mountains. According to Bárberi Squarotti, Deledda translates expiation into the kind of journey that occurs in fairy tales. In the novel, however, all that the reader sees of such travels is the return—the reappearance of a character who, typically, has derived a sense of solitude from the experience of isolated meditation. Indeed, her novels recount few details regarding the geography of travels beyond Sardinia, even in her later novels, which thus disprove the notion that sheer geographic ignorance impelled her to refrain from writing about places other than Sardinia.

The exception to the lack of outside description is Dopo il divorzio (1902; translated as After the Divorce: A Romance, 1905), in which Costantino’s jail time on the mainland for a false murder conviction is described in some detail, but only to emphasize his misery when he learns that his wife, Giovanna, has taken advantage of a new law and divorced him. The description of Costantino’s prison environment serves to emphasize the domestic prison in which Giovanna is cast. Left alone with a child when her husband is sent away, she allows herself to be courted by the rich and brutal Brontu, and eventually she marries him. When Costantino returns, he finds her in greater misery than when he had left her. Dopo il divorzio ends with Giovanna and Costantino falling into each other’s arms. This ending was amended for the English translation of 1905, to which Deledda added an “Epilogue” in which Brontu dies and Costantino and Giovanna are reunited as a happy family. In 1920 Deledda recast the novel with a new title, Naufraghi in porto (Shipwrecks in Port); in this version, Costantino actually commits the crime for which he had been falsely accused: he murders the wicked old woman who had encouraged Giovanna to leave him for Brontu. As Carla Locatelli has pointed out, this change does not just give the novel a new ending but makes it another novel altogether. Unlike the earlier version, Naufraghi in porto hints darkly that Costantino was not an innocent victim but was predetermined to be a murderer. This point is something that has not been fully appreciated by the secondary literature.

Deledda’s next most significant novel, L’edera, also concerns the issue of predestination. The plot pivots on the murder of Ziu Zua (Uncle Zua), an old relative of the Decherchi family; Annesa, a girl whom the Decherchis took into their household when she was quite young, kills Ziu Zua in order that the family’s debts would be paid and they would retain the only properties they have left—their house and one tanca. As events unfold, the novel shows how her crime need not have been committed; yet, the authorities will not catch Annesa, thus reconfirming their extraneous existence beside Sardinian inner laws and rules. The idea of expiation and penitence for the murder she carried out, however, will persist in her soul. The decadence of the Sardinian aristocrats lies at the center of L’edera; still more preoccupied by societal position within their small village and ancient fiefdom than with actual economic concerns, they are unable to progress with the times. The poor, who have always lived at the side of the padroni, both physically and psychologically, will also be ruined; humble people with no possessions, they remain, at all costs, traditionally faithful to their masters.

Annesa commits a crime to save the honor and family name of her benefactors. From the moment they gave her shelter, after discovering her abandoned on the side of the road in Barunei, with no family name of her own, she has devoted herself to the Decherchis. She now stays close to the family, “come l’edera che si attacca al muro” (like ivy sticks to a wall) until the wall falls, as her longtime secret lover, Paulu, says bitterly after an outburst from the heroine. Following her murderous act, a moment in which Annesa somehow loses her ability to understand the path to follow for her future and irreversibly taints her life, the village priest, Prete Virdis, visits her in the hope of helping her retrieve a sense of morals and ethics. Yet, insistently projecting herself as a member of the family by using the possessive nostra, Annesa says to Prete Virdis:

Non so ... È vero; da molti e molti anni non credevo più in Dio, perché troppe sventure cadevano sulla nostra famiglia, come fulmini sullo stesso albero.... In questi giorni, però, ho pensato a Dio, qualche volta: e ora penso che ella ha ragione, prete Virdis, ma io non sono malvagia come lei crede; io ho fatto male a me stessa, è vero, ma l’ho fatto per far del bene agli altri. E sono pronta ancora, le ripeto: mi dica che cosa devo fare.

(I do not know ... It is true; I have not believed in God for many, many years, because too many disgraces were falling upon our family, like lightning bolts on the same tree.... These days my thoughts have sometimes addressed God: and now I think you were right, Prete Virdis, but I am not as wicked as you think; I have hurt myself, it’s true, but I have done it to do some good to others. And I am ready: tell me what to do.)

On the last page of the novel, the message of the author is clear: Annesa will eventually marry Paulu, but the old tree to which she alludes in her talk with Prete Virdis—a metaphor for the Decherchi family, who are now stained by the crime—will no longer hear any fruit. Her life will continue to be one of repentance and sacrifice, not unlike her life before she unnecessarily murdered Ziu Zua.

Approximately five years after L’edera came out, Canne al vento was published—one of the few novels that Deledda counted as a favorite. It tells of the three Pintor sisters, who once owned all the land surrounding their village but are now left with a tiny plot and their servant, Efix, to take care of it. Signor Predu, their cousin, is a rich and powerful landowner who hovers as a constant threat to the sisters. Resembling a Greek tragedy, Canne al vento focuses on both Efix, who believes himself guilty of killing his master, Don Zame, the father of the young women, and on Lia, the fourth Pintor sister, who is physically absent from the narrative but whom other characters—subsequently including Giacinto, the son she left behind—frequently discuss. Lia left the family and the island some time ago for the Continent. For Efix, she represented true love; though an act of self-defense, his murder of Lia’s father occurred because the oppressive Don Zame was trying to prevent his dissatisfied daughter from running away. Haunted by his master’s death and Lia’s departure, Efix feels he must expiate all his life for the crime he has committed. When he takes walks in the forest and in the fields to calm himself, Efix hears the noise of the panas (women who died giving birth), and he sees the ammattadore (little elf) and the janas; all three of these phenomena are tropes of the ancestral and mythical heritage of Sardinia that Deledda studied years before. Efix’s world is limited to the care of the Pintor sisters’ poor possessions, until the day a letter announces Giacinto’s arrival; Efix and the sisters harbor hopes that Lia’s son will help return the family to their former affluence. Yet, as they all eventually learn, Giacinto arrives on the island to escape the law on the other side of the sea for a crime he has committed. After several misunderstood incidents, and because one of the sisters, Noemi, reacts hysterically to what she believes is her servant’s wrongdoing, Efix leaves the house and takes up the life of a wandering beggar, dying in the end only after he has suffered for his terrible crime.

Marianna Sirca, one of Deledda’s most accomplished works, embodies an analysis of one year in the lives of the two main characters, Marianna Sirca and Simone Sole—particularly of the development of their impossible love. As many critics have noted, this simple story resembles Verga’s “L’amante di Gramigna” (The Mistress of Gramigna, first published in Vita dei Campi [1897, Country Life]) through its treatment of the motif of passion and of the character of the bandito. The love between Marianna, a wealthy young woman, and her former servant turned bandit, Simone, is forbidden because of their vastly disparate social backgrounds. Although she was born into poor circumstances, Marianna lives according to the path laid out by her family—particularly by her uncle, a rich priest who adopted her when she was a child. He treats her like a prison inmate: under lock and key, she lives constantly under his control and is incapable of any independent action. She thus follows an existence that strikingly parallels the life of Simone, but as a servant he can scarcely conceive of falling in love with Marianna. Only after her uncle dies and she becomes the sole heir to his fortune, and after Simone adopts the ways of a bandit in order to feed his family, do the two meet again and fall in love.

The reasons for the love between Marianna and Simone are not purely sentimental; in essence, they have plainly tired of pursuing the lives that others had planned for them. Marianna experiences serenity and peace only in the countryside, in the pure simplicity of her father, Berte’s, company, and—while she cannot help but blame her father for the awful life she led with her uncle—she nonetheless wants to return to her roots as a shepherd’s daughter. Simone, on the other hand, turns out not to be the great bandit she believed he was, and she feels deceived by her own desperate longing for love. Simone falls in love with Marianna because he hopes that her presence and wealth will end his undesirable existence as an outlaw, much in the same way that she sees in him the possibility of a more lively and satisfying life than the one she has lived until then: “E Marianna aveva obbedito. Aveva obbedito sempre fin da quando bambina era stata messa come un uccellino in una gabbia nella casa dello zio, a spandere la gioia e la luce della sua fanciuellezza, attorno al melanconico sacerdote, in cambio della possibile eredità di lui” (And Marianna had obeyed. Had always obeyed, since as a girl she had been put like a bird in a cage in her uncle’s house, to irradiate the joy and the light of her youth around the melancholic priest, in exchange for his future inheritance).

A figure of fascination in Sardinian lore, the bandit is a masculine figure who lives on the periphery of society in order to keep his name and his dignity; by not robbing from priests or churches and by visiting his family regularly, the bandit does display a certain code of honor. Simone, however, is not a true bandito because he is tired of living like an outlaw and wants finally to rest. By loving Simone, Marianna challenges the societal taboos that protect the honor of a woman, but she cannot forgive him his ambivalence about ceding, for her, his “freedom” as a bandit and taking responsibility for his own actions—as she herself has done by associating her name with Simone’s. As Deledda’s novels show, Sardinian women follow their passions and the weight of their decisions until the end, even at the risk of great losses to themselves. Whereas men appear weak and act indecisively until their own ends, women such as Marianna in Marianna Sirca, Annesa in L’edera, and Olí in Cenere exhibit enduring strength. In “Woman as Outlaw: Grazia Deledda and the Politics of Gender,” published in Modern Language Notes (1995), Susan Briziarelli wrote that

Deledda’s positioning of her female charaters along side the marginalized and rebel group of outlaws illustrates and gives voice to her vision of a society constructed along a class and power axis. It is clear that she aligns her strong women ideologically with the socially outcast group, finding in them the common denominator not only of courage and rebellion, but of transgression against society. As sheltered women with little formal education and few positive roles, Deledda’s female characters cannot visualize their own struggle within a consciously ideological framework, but tend rather to associate it with that of the banditi, as metaphor for society’s outcasts.

The famed Italian critic Attilio Momigliano noted in 1948 that La madre, Deledda’s next significant work, and Elias Portolu are quite similar, especially in terms of their main characters: reflecting a feminine beauty and delicate manners, Paulo in La madre recalls Elias both physically and psychologically. A novel that explores erotic themes, La madre relates the story of Paulo, a young priest, who is assigned the parish of his mother’s old village. Apparently, the village has fallen under a strange curse that brings ruin upon the priests who serve there, as if affirming the independence of a religion that dates prior to Christianity. Paulo’s predecessor smoked, went out with women, and drank excessively, and Paulo himself is on the verge of treading the same path. His mother, Maria Maddalena, who silently toiled as a maid in the seminary for years to support her son’s aspirations for the priesthood, keeps a watch on him and his weaknesses; she is prepared to compensate for them in case of danger. From the window she observes Paulo in the dark of night as he departs for the house of a lonely and wealthy woman, Agnese. The mother immediately senses the risky nature of this relationship; yet, when Paulo asks her to deliver a letter to Agnese, she does so, albeit with some hesitation.

The weight of her son’s guilt and the terror of losing all that she has long worked and fought for is paramount to Maria Maddalena, and she suddenly drops dead in the modest church of Aar as her son says Sunday mass. As Testaferri asserts in Donna: Women in Italian Culture, the Jungian archetypes of the moon and the night in the novel are key. Together they enhance the repressive, occluded atmosphere surrounding Paulo, who feels at once the necessity of both his mother’s and Agnese’s presence, yet becomes suffocated by them. When Paulo’s mother closes a door with large bars in one of the first sequences of the novel, she represents—according to Testaferri—the repressive primary archetype of the Great Mother, whereas Agnese in her “castle” stands for the Terrible Mother. A figure of seduction, Agnese lures the poor young priest toward deception and the corruption of the sacred vows. Paulo’s eventual victory over Agnese is, in Testaferri’s words, “un’ovvia vittoria in senso cristiano, cioè é superamento della came e trionfo della luminosità, trionfo cioé dell’archetipo del Maschile” (the victory in a Christian sense, the one surpassing the flesh with the triumph of luminosity, that is the triumph of the Masculine archetype). This victory may also be viewed as Deledda’s final manifestation of sympathy and understanding for a mother who sacrificed herself entirely on her son’s behalf.

Six years after the appearance of La madre, Grazia Deledda received the Nobel Prize in Literature; her only travel away from Sardinia and Italy occurred when she went to Stockholm to accept the award. Deledda received the prize with little personal fanfare; being a Nobel laureate did not materially change her quiet life. The reception in Italy of the honor given her was cool, almost skeptical, especially since several other authors, notably Luigi Pirandello, were thought to be much better candidates. Pirandello, who did win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, had already expressed his frustration with Deledda’s fame and literary success in his novel Suo marito (1911, Her Husband), a satire of the Deledda-Madesani partnership. Perhaps because of this ridicule, perhaps just because of her reclusive nature, Deledda did not in any way vaunt her status as a Nobel winner. For the next decade, until her death in 1936, she continued to live surrounded by family and to write a novel a year.

She published ten more novels before her death, and one more was published posthumously. In this last period Deledda allowed herself to be more autobiographical. Cosima, published the year after her death, tells the story of her own childhood in Nuoro. Two less cheerful novels, II paese del vento (1931) and La chiesa della solitudine (1936; translated as The Church of Solitude, 2002), focus on themes of physical and spiritual health. In the first, the protagonist, Nina, who has gone to live by the seaside with her new husband, finds her old love, Gabriele, dying of tuberculosis. Gabriele is, even in his illness, a romantic figure, but Nina’s decision to turn away from her childhood obsessions and toward a new life with her practical and rather stolid husband echoes Deledda’s own life with Madesani. La chiesa della solitudine portrays Maria Concezione, a young woman who is introduced as she leaves the hospital after having a cancerous breast removed. Maria Concezione’s struggle with mortality is mirrored in the sufferings of several other characters, but her self-imposed silence about her own illness becomes desperate when her inability to speak almost causes the death of the man she loves. The autobiographical element in this work is strong, since Deledda had been diagnosed with breast cancer several years earlier and was dying as she wrote this novel, the last to be published in her lifetime.

The author of more than four hundred short stories and more than forty novels, Grazia Deledda died on 15 August 1936 in Rome. Her talent resided notably in her microscopic analysis of the people, the feelings, and the nature of Sardinia—which she made known to a wide readership through her extensive writings. Traces of the motifs and themes she employed in her fiction and plays continue to appear in the works of Sardinian writers such as Salvatore Mannussu, Salvatore Salta, and Giuseppe Dessì. She also influenced many Italian women writers, especially in the ways they address the role of women in patriarchal societies such as that of Southern Italy. Deledda’s voice was distinctive and highly original, a product of her compelling Sardinian heritage. As the third-person narrator in Cosima states, in veiled allusion to the writer: “Tutto del resto, è straordinario per lei: pare venuta da un mondo diverso da quello dove vive, e la sua fantasia è piena di ricordi confusi di quel mondo di sogno, mentre la realtà di questo non le dispiace, se la guarda a modo suo, cioè anch’esso coi colori della sua fantasia” (Everything is extraordinary for her: she seems to have come from a world entirely different from the one in which she lives, and her fantasy is crowded with dazed memories of that dreamworld, while she does not mind the reality of this, if she looks at it in her own way, that is, with the colors of her imagination).

Letters

Lettere di Grazia Deledda a Marino Moretti (1913-1923) (Padova: Rebellato, 1959);

Lettere inedite (Milan: Fabbri, 1966).

Bibliography

Remo Branca, Bibliografia deleddiana (Milan: L’Eroica, 1938).

Biographies

Carolyn Balducci, A Self-Made Woman: Biography of Nobel-Prize-Winner Grazia Deledda (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975);

Marilyn Migiel, “Grazia Deledda (1871-1936),” in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russell (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 111-118.

References

Francesco Alziator, “Grazia Deledda e le tradizioni popolari,” in Convegno Nazionale di studi deleddiani, Nuoro, 30 settembre 1972: Atti (Cagliari: Fossataro, 1975), pp. 175-189;

Mario Aste, “Echoes of ’Verismo’ in Deledda’s La chiesa della solitudine,” in The Flight of Ulysses: Studies in Memory of Emmanuel Hahantonis, edited by Augus tus Mastri (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Annali d’italianistica, 1997), pp. 257-266;

Giorgio Barbári Squarotti, “La tecnica e la struttura del romanzo deleddiano,” in Convegno Nazionale di studi deleddiani, Nuoro, 30 settembre 1972: Atti (Cagliari: Fossataro, 1975), pp. 127-159;

Paola Blelloch, “Grazia Deledda’s and Gavino Ledda’s Writing on Sardinia: Two Sides of the Same Reality,” Italian Quarterly, 18 (1995): 47-58;

Remo Branca, Il segreto di Grazia Deledda (Cagliari: Fossataro, 1971);

Susan Briziarelli, “Woman as Outlaw: Grazia Deledda and the Politics of Gender,” Modern Language Notes, 110 (1995): 20-31;

Carol Burton, “Deledda’s Purgatorio,” Italica, 57 (1980): 96-106;

Antonio Cara, “Cenere” di Grazia Deledda nelle figurazioni di Eleonora Duse (Nuoro: Istituto Superiore Regionale Etnografico, 1984);

Daniela Cavallero, “Io e Lei: Una donna e Cosima: Due esempi di autobiografia al femminile,” Romance Languages Annual, 5 (1993): 174-179;

Alberto Maria Cirese, “Grazia Deledda e il mondo tradizionale sardo,” Problemi, 36-37 (1973): 328-331;

Cirese, Intellettuali, folklore, istinto di classe: Note su Verga, Deledda, Scotellaro, Gramsci (Turin: Einaudi, 1976);

Rosario Contarino, “Il mito della Sardegna nel Lawrence viaggiatore e critico della Deledda,” Campi lmmaginabili,3 (1991): 119-126;

Bice De Chiara, Psicologismo deleddiano in “Elias Portulu” e “Canne al vento” (Naples: Loffredo, 1975);

Neria De Giovanni, Come leggere “Canne al vento” di Grazia Deledda (Milan: Mursia, 1993);

Eurialo De Michelis, “Riassunto sulla Deledda,” Arcadia, 5 (1972): 35-79;

Giuseppe Dessí, “Grazia Deledda cent’anni dopo,” Nuova Antologia, 513 (1971): 307-311;

Floro Di Zenzo, Vocazione narrativa di Grazia Deledda (Naples: Glaux, 1967);

Maria Luisa Dodero Costa, “I. S. Turgenev e Grazia Deledda,” in Mondo slavo e cultura italiana: Contributi italiani al IX congresso internazionale degli slavisti, Kiev 1983, edited by Jitka Kresalkova (Rome: Veltro, 1983), pp. 110-121;

Anna Dolfi, Grazia Deledda (Milan: Mursia, 1979);

Carlo Ferrucci, “Grazia Cosima Deledda,” Nuovi-Argomenti, 53-54 (1977): 304-315;

Jill Franks, “The Regionalist Community: Indigenous versus Outsider Consciousness in Deledda’s La madre and Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia,” in Regionalism Reconsidered: New Approaches to the Field, edited by David Jordan (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 87-103;

Giuseppe Giacalone, Ritratto critico di Grazia Deledda (Rome: Ciranna, 1965);

Lorenzo Greco, “Amore fra cugini: Letteratura e contesto antropologico nella Deledda,” Il Ponte, 38, nos. 1-2 (1982): 109-122;

D. B. Gregor, “Polychrome in Grazia Deledda,” Modern Languages, 51 (1970): 160-166;

Lynn Gunzberg, “Ruralism, Folklore, and Grazia Deledda’s Novels,” Modern Language Studies, 13, no.3 (1983): 112-122;

Giulio Herczeg, “La struttura della frase di Grazia Deledda,” in Italia linguistica nuova ed antica: Studi linguistici in memoria di Oronzo Parlangeli, edited by Vittore Pisani, Ciro Santoro, Giovan Battista, and P. Mancarella, Collana di saggi e testi, nos. 6-7 (Galatina: Congedo, 1976-1978), pp. 19-55;

Margherita Heyer-Caput, “Per svelare II segreto dell’uomo solitario di Grazia Deledda,” Quaderni d’Italianistica: Official Journal of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies, 22 (2001): 121-138;

Rebecca Hopkins, “Re-examining Female Desire: Inheritance Law, Colonialism, and Folklore in Grazia Deledda’s La volpe,” Quaderni d’Italianistica: Official Journal of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies, 23 (2002): 59-86;

Janice M. Kozma, Grazia Deledda’s Eternal Adolescents: The Pathology of Arrested Maturation (Madison, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002);

Giuseppe Leone, “La narrativa di Grazia Deledda tra verismo e decadentismo,” Cristallo, 38, no. 3 (1996): 96-99;

Carla Locatelli, “Le morali del desiderio deleddiano: Dopo il divorzio,” in Deledda, Dopo il divorzio, La Biblioteca dell’identita 25 (Cagliari: Società Edi-trice L’Unione Sarda, 2004), pp. vii-xxxiii;

Olga Lombardi, Invito alla lettura di Grazia Deledda (Milan: Mursia, 1979);

Alessandro Madesani, Gino Pilandri, and Umberto Foschi, eds., Nel paese del vento: Grazia Deledda, Lina Sacchetti, Isotta Gervasi a Cervia (Ravenna: Longo, 1998);

Mario Massaiu, “II folklore sardo nell’opera di Grazia Deledda,” in his Sardegna in prospettiva euromediteranea. Le nuove nazioni’ esemplficate con una cultura insulare (Florence: Olschki, 1977), pp. 323-333;

Massaiu, La Sardegna di Grazia Deledda (Milan: CELUC, 1972);

Allen E. McCormick, “Grazia Deledda’s La madre and the Problems of Tragedy,” Symposium, 22 (1968): 62-67;

Mario Miccinesi, Grazia Deledda (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1975);

Marilyn Migiel, “The Devil and the Phoenix: A Reading of Grazia Deledda’s Cenere,” Stanford Italian Review, 5, no.1 (1985): 55-73;

Attilio Momigliano, Storia della letterature italiana (Milan-Messina: Principato, 1948);

Bice Mortara Garavelli, “La lingua di Grazia Deledda,” Strumenti Critid, 65 (1991): 145-163;

Anco Marzio Mutterle, “I colori dell’idillio,” Studi nove-centeschi, 14 (1987): 197-208;

Giuseppe Petronio, “Grazia Deledda e i suoi critici,” Problemi, 79 (1987): 124-137;

Antonio Piromalli, “Durata e disfacimento della realta nelle trame narrative di Grazia Deledda,” Italianistica,3 (1974): 118-122;

Piromalli, Grazia Deledda (Florence, 1968);

Dino Provenzal, “Grazia Deledda e il Premio Nobel,” Anima e Pensiero, 2 (1966): 17-19;

Ada Ruschioni, Dalla Deledda a Pavese (Milan: Vita & Pensiero, 1977);

Giuliana Sanguinetti Katz,”Grazia Deledda vista attraverso il suo epistolario,” Campi Immaginabili: Rivista Quadrimestrale di Cultura, 16-18 (1996): 29-40;

Sanguinetti Katz, “Immagini e strutture in un racconto della Deledda,” Quaderni d’ltalianistica, 15 (1994): 205-215;

Sanguinetti Katz, “La scoperta dell’identità femminile nel romanzo Cosima di Grazia Deledda,” Rivista di Studi Italiani, 12, no.1 (1994): 55-73;

Antonio Scano, Grazia Deledda (Milan: Virgilio, 1972);

Ines Scaramucci, Studi del Novecento: Prospective e itinerari (Milan: IPL, 1968);

Vittorio Spinazzola, “Grazia Deledda e il pubblico,” Problemi, 35 (1973): 269-277;

Ada Testaferri, “Infrazione all’Eros proibito come processo d’individuazione in La madre di Grazia Deledda,” in Donna: Women in Italian Culture, edited by Testaferri (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989), pp. 109-120;

Maria Tettamanzi, Grazia Deledda (Brescia: La scuola, 1969);

Antonio Tobia, Grazia Deledda (Rome: Ciranna, 1971);

Simona Wright, “Elementi narrativi nell’opera deleddiana con particolare attenzione all’Incendio nell’oliveto,” Nemla Italian Studies, 18 (1994): 83-103;

Patrizia Zambon and Pier Luigi Renai, “Preliminare di indagine sulle novelle di Grazia Deledda per il Corriere della Sera (1909-1914),” Problemi, 79 (1987): 138-157.

Papers

An important archive of Grazia Deledda’s letters and other papers is held privately by her family.