Grazia Deledda's Eternal Adolescent: The Pathology of Arrested Maturation (The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies)

Deledda, the Nobel Prize winner of 1926, a century ago identified a psychosociological pathology: the arrested maturation of her male characters. Throughout her prose, truncated maturity functions as a psychological undertow, sucking down its suffers and the women who love them into the depths of fictive drama. Concomitantly she dissects male-female relationships within the framing leitmotiv of prolonged male adolescence, undergirded by a woman's boundless tolerance for male narcissistic despair. Deledda's literary strategy subverts conventional expectations in surprising ways, as she exposes the inner working of a patronistic world where her women can finally wield a fragment of power.Janice Kozma is the author of 'Grazia Deledda's Eternal Adolescent: The Pathology of Arrested Maturation (The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies)', published 2002 under ISBN 9780838639351 and ISBN 0838639356.