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This is a timely and extensive biography of a writer who, in the early twentieth century, achieved such status in the literary world that publishers in Italy vied for her novels, and editors felt honoured to publish her short stories and 'sketches'. Now, almost seventy years after her death, her novels continue to be reprinted and translated, and critical appreciation of her work continues to grow. Her works still live and have the power to move her readers.
Winner of the 1926 Nobel Prize in Literature In this tragic novel set in the author's native Sardinia, Constantino Ledda has been convicted and sentenced for the murder of his cruel uncle. Though innocent of the crime, he accepts the verdict as punishment for marrying Giovanna Era through a civil ceremony rather than an expensive church wedding. When Constantino is taken away, Giovanna has no way to provide for herself or family, and out of desperation divorces her husband and marries a wealthy but brutish landowner. When the real killer confesses and Constantino is released, he and Giovanna begin a forbidden and ultimately destructive affair.
Central to Grazia Deledda’s narrative worlds are the relationships between her characters and the vast landscapes they inhabit. Deledda decodes, translates, and represents her characters, her characters’ emotions, and her natural and urban landscapes in a language that shares a vocabulary with the visual arts. However, despite the fact that her descriptions contain the gradation of Modernist painting, beginning with Impressionism, no book-length study has been dedicated to investigating Deledda’s relationship with the visual arts and the resulting painterly aesthetic of her colorful and nuanced narratives. Grazia Deledda’s Painterly Aesthetic seeks to present an articulated and color...
The Church of Solitude tells the story of Maria Concezione, a young Sardinian seamstress living with breast cancer at the cusp of the twentieth century. Overwhelmed by the shame of her diagnosis, she decides that no one can know what has happened to her, but the heavy burden of this secrecy changes her life in dramatic ways and almost causes the destruction of several people in her life. This surprising novel paints the portrait of a woman facing the unknown with courage, faith, and self-reliance, and is the last and most autobiographical work of Grazia Deledda, who died of breast cancer in 1936, shortly after its publication. An afterword by the translator offers additional information on the author and examines the social and historical environment of that time.
Grazia Deledda's Dance of Modernity is a highly original and innovative interpretation of Deledda's narrative in philosophical perspective, which also includes the study of textual variations and considers cultural history in Italy during the early twentieth century.
The rugged landscape of Baronia on Sardinia sets the scene for this novel of crime, guilt and retribution. This novel presents the story of the Pintor sisters - from a family of noble landowners now in decline - their nephew Giacinto, and their servant Efix, who is trying to make up for a mysterious sin committed many years before. Around, below, and inside them the raging Mediterranean storms, the jagged mountains, the murmuring forests, and the gushing springs form a Greek chorus of witness to the tragic drama of this unforgiving land. Deledda tells her story with her characteristic love of the natural landscape and fascination with the folk culture of the island, with details about the famous religious festivals held in mountain encampments and the lore of the "dark beings who populate the Sardinian night, the fairies who live in rocks and caves, and the sprites with seven red caps who bother sleep." Introduction by the Sardinian ethnographer, Dolores Turchi.
Famous Italian romantic writer Grazia Deledda's book 'Nostalgia' was first published in the year 1905. This book is an autobiographical story of early days of her being with her husband, and is a narrative of their romance together.
"Cosima" tells the story of an aspiring writer growing up in Nuoro, Sardinia during the last decades of the nineteenth century when formal education for women was rare and literary careers unheard-of. Based on Deledda's own life, the work describes a young woman's struggle against the dismay and disapproval of her family and friends at her creative ambitions. Yet it also reads like a charming fable with details of family life, rural traditions and wild bandits, and it is as much a novel of memory as of character or action. Deledda's characters are poor country folk driven by some predetermined force. Their loves are tragic, their lives as hard and as rigidly controlled as nature itself in th...
Winner of the 1926 Novel Prize for Literature After serving time in mainland Italy for a minor theft, Elias Portolu returns home to Nuoro, in rural Sardinia. Lonely and vulnerable after his prison exile, he falls in love with his brother's fiancée. But he finds himself trapped by social and religious strictures, his passion and guilt winding into a spiral of anguish and paralyzing indecision. For guidance he turns first to the village priest, who advises him to resist temptation; then he turns to the pagan "father of the woods," who recognizes the weakness of human will and urges him to declare his love before it is too late.
Throughout Deledda's novels, truncated maturity functions as a psychological undertow sucking down its sufferers and their loved ones to the depths of fictive drama."--BOOK JACKET.