The Dance Of The Necklace (Modern Italian Fiction Series)

In The Dance of the Necklace, Grazia Deledda moves away from the countryside of her native Sardinia to create a classically modern, urban narrative. Writing in a more spare, experimental style, she uncovers the "vain anguish of our strongest passions: love, ambition, and the instinct to appear more than what we are." A pearl necklace symbolizes the "dance" of jealousy, greed, and love, both erotic and familial, which unites and divides the three main characters: an aunt and her niece who share the same name and a young count seeking to regain his family's bartered string of pearls. An innocent deception turns on itself to explore the nature of the double and the mask: two topoi of modernity. Like Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, and Annie Ernaux, Deledda delves into what it means to be a woman, alone and aging, living in a world where she is increasingly unwanted and invisible despite her lingering desires. According to the critic Margherita Heyer-Caput, the novel is one of Deledda's "most conscious and disquieting expressions of modernity." It challenges the labels often applied to this writer and overturns established critical categories to question margin-center hierarchies applied to her work. The Dance of the Necklace is a remarkable and rare example of Deledda's modernism. First English translation of La Danza della Collana (1924). Introduction, notes, bibliography. 124 pages.

• | Author: Grazia Deledda, Mary Ann Frese Witt
• | Publisher: Italica Press
• | Publication Date: Mar 01, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 124 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1599104490
• | ISBN-13: 9781599104492