"The novels in the Neapolitan Quartet were not, as we now know, written by Elena Ferrante, the mysterious daughter of seamstress in Naples, who now lives abroad teaching classics but by Anita Raja, a prominent translator of German literature, whose father was a judge and whose German-Jewish mother wrote language textbooks. Does any of this matter? Does it or should it change the way we read and think about these best-selling novels? In Finding Ferrante in Contemporary World Literature, Alessia Riccardi argues that Ferrante's biography, which was eagerly consumed by English-speaking readers, has led to a critical reception of the Neapolitan novels that downplay their literary ambitions and political critiques. In examining the Neapolitan Quartet with Anita Raja as author, Riccardi considers four different dimensions of the novels, including sexuality, work, politics, and their status as works of global fiction. Rather than reading Ferrante's novels as works of autofiction shaped by the local and national cultures of Naples and Italy, Riccardi begins by examining how Raja's work as a translator of Goethe, Benjamin, and Christa Wolf and in dialogue with the varied concerns of these writers and world literature more broadly. Ultimately, in viewing these novels as written by Raja and not "Ferrante," Riccardi contends that what is at stake is not the personal authenticity of writing but rather its ethical and political imagination and the ways in which fiction gives expression to ideas and truths not expressed in reality"-- Provided by publisher.
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