Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Engagement in the Italian Novel
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A01=Laura Lucia Rossi
Anna Maria Ortese L'Iguana
Author_Laura Lucia Rossi
Carlo Emilio Gadda La cognizione del dolore
Category=DSBH
Elio Vittorini Conversazione in Sicilia
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Federigo Tozzi Con gli occhi chiusi
forthcoming
Hybridism in Twentieth-Century Fiction
Italian Modernist Fiction
Literary Indeterminacy
Narrative Ambiguity in Italian Literature
Tommaso Landolfi La pietra lunare
Product details
- ISBN 9781041126713
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 06 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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What makes literature ‘literary’? Some theories argue it is a certain degree of ungraspability— openness, vagueness, or ambiguity that invites readers’ active participation in constructing meaning. This book examines five canonical twentieth-century Italian novels (by Tozzi, Landolfi, Vittorini, Gadda, and Ortese) that have consistently been described by critics as particularly “indeterminate” or “ungraspable.” Through these case studies, spanning fifty years of Italian literature, the book investigates how textual indeterminacy functions as a literary strategy rather than a shortcoming. Each novel employs different techniques to create indeterminacy: fragmented punctuation and syntax in Tozzi, fantastic elements and hesitation in Landolfi, dialogic openness in Vittorini, linguistic accumulation in Gadda, and genre hybridism in Ortese. These works challenged readers’ expectations decades before postmodernists like Calvino made such techniques commonplace. By analyzing how these novels manipulate indeterminacy and engage readers in meaning-making, this book contributes to our understanding of literary communication while offering fresh interpretations of key works in the Italian canon.
Laura Lucia Rossi is a Lecturer in Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Leeds.
