This book examines the oevre of Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998) from her first literary writings in the Thirties to her great novels in the Nineties. The analysis focusses on two interweaving core themes, loss and the Other. It begins with the shaping of personal loss of an Other following death, separation, abandonment, coupled with melancholy for life's transience as depicted in autobiographical works and in her masterpiece Il porto di Toledo. The book thenaddresses Ortese's literary engagement with social themes in realist stories set in post-war Naples in her collection Il mare non bagna Napoli and then explores her continuing preoccupation with socio-ethicalissues, imbued with autobiographical elements, in non-realist texts, including her masterful novels L'Iguana, Il cardillo addolorato and Alonso e i visionariThe book combines theme and genre analysis, highlighting Ortese's adoption and hybridization of diverse literary forms such as poetry, the novel, the short story, the essay, autobiography, realism, fairy tales, fantasy, allegory. In her work Ortese weaves an ongoing dialogue with literary andnon-literary works, through direct quotations, allusions, echoes, adoption of motifs and topoi. The book thus highlights the intertextual relationship with her sources: Leopardi, Dante, Petrarch, Manzoni, Collodi, Montale,Serao; Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Blake, Joyce, Conrad, Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Hardy; Manrique, Gongora, de Quevedo, Villalón, Bello, Cantar del mio Cid; Heine, Valery, Puccini's Madam Butterfly, folklore, popular songs, and the Bible. Ortese thus shapes her literary themes in the background of social, political and economic upheavals over six decades of Italian history, culminating in an allegorical critique of modernity and a call for a renewed bond between humans and the Other.

Vilma De Gasperin was born and brought up in Italy and studied English and German for her degree at the University of Padova. She then moved to Britain where she taught Italian language at the University of Plymouth. She completed her doctoral thesis on Anna Maria Ortese at the University of Oxford and was granted her D.Phil in Italian Literature in 2007. She has completed an M.Litt. in the History of the Italian language, and has published articles on Anna MariaOrtese and Vivian Lamarque. In 2011 she edited a collection of essays on the Italian language and in 2003 she published a collection of poetry. De Gasperin is Senior Language Instructor in Italian atthe Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and the Language Centre at the University of Oxford, and she is College Lecturer in Italian at Exeter College.