Anna Maria Ortese

"Anna Maria Ortese will set the standard against which other collections on Ortese will have to measure. The editors have assembled an impressive array of critical essays, containing many brilliant insights and observations that provide the reader with a critical compass with which to navigate Ortese's complex and vast oeuvre." -- Daniela La Penna, Italian Studies Programme, University of Reading "Anna Maria Ortese: Celestial Geographies is an excellent collection of essays that makes a major contribution to the study of an author whose importance in modern Italian literature is increasingly being recognized." -- Luca Somigli, Department of Italian Studies, University of Toronto

Anna Maria Ortese: Celestial Geographies features a selection of essays by established Ortese scholars that trace her remarkable creative trajectory.

After years of obscurity, Anna Maria Ortese (1914–1998) is emerging as one of the most important Italian authors of the twentieth-century, taking her place alongside such luminaries as Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, and Elsa Morante. Anna Maria Ortese: Celestial Geographies features a selection of essays by established Ortese scholars that trace her remarkable creative trajectory.

Bringing a wide range of critical perspectives to Ortese’s work, the contributors to this collection map the author’s complex textual geography, with its overlapping literary genres, forms, and conceptual categories, and the rhetorical and narrative strategies that pervade Ortese’s many types of writing. The essays are complemented by material translated here for the first time: Ortese’s unpublished letters to her mentor, the writer Massimo Bontempelli; and an extended interview with Ortese by fellow Italian novelist Dacia Maraini.