Dreams and Reality in the Poetics of Elsa Morante:Diary 1938, History: A Novel, and Aracoeli

The subject of this monograph, Dreams and Reality in the Poetics of Elsa Morante: Diary of 1938, History: A Novel, and Aracoeli, is structured around two thematic sections. The first provides a biographical-critical framework and examines the reception of Elsa Morante’s work in former Yugoslavia, as well as in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia after the 1990s. The second section offers a textual analysis and interpretation of Morante’s Diary of 1938 and her novels History: A Novel and Aracoeli.

The textual analysis applies Julia Kristeva’s concept of the chora and Fanny Söderbäck’s notion of “revolutionary time.” By introducing an interdisciplinary approach that brings together autopoetics, feminist theory, and the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams, the study opens new interpretive perspectives and deepens the understanding of Morante’s poetics and her ethical conception of literature. The representation of dreams as an epistemological tool through which suppressed socio-historical traumas are revealed further redefines the semiotic space and the figure of the mother as a site of resistance to dominant ideologies.

This publication offers important new insights into the poetics of one of the most significant Italian writers of the twentieth century and presents them for the first time to both the academic community and a broader readership, as it is the first monograph on Elsa Morante published in Serbian.