Grazia Deledda’s Painterly Aesthetic

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 colorful literary panorama of Deledda’s novels and short stories situated between literature and pictorial art. The analyses guided by these two cardinal points are undertaken by contributors who have a profound awareness of an epochal change and work in different disciplines. Two years from the centenary of her receipt of the Nobel Prize, the contributors investigate the connections, consonances, and differences between Grazia Deledda’s oeuvre and other works inside this panorama to verify and affirm a possible unity of purpose. At the same time, they seek to ascertain whether these connections can corroborate and exalt the choices that the Sardinian writer had made with great effort to free herself from the constraints of an environment that was at times hostile to her aesthetic choices.