Breve ma veridica storia di Anna Banti

Abstract

My doctoral thesis intends to fill a void in Italian literary criticism: that of a monograph on Anna Banti (pseudonym of Lucia Lopresti). Her activity includes twenty-five works, scattered writings (narrative writings and writings of manners, writings of literary criticism, writings of film criticism, writings of art), translations, curatorship. The bibliography of critics (1937-1985) is composed of works’ reviews. Since 1985 it has about a hundred articles, most of which dedicated to Artemisia and flourished in an Anglo-Saxon environment. In 1978 Enza Biagini published Anna Banti for Mursia. It is a monograph in which works are divided into genres, «as cut from the whole story of the novel» 2 . It does not include works published after Da un paese vicino (1975). Furthermore, it does not consider two areas that I believe are essential for a true understanding of Banti's writing: art writings, dating back to the period when Banti was an art critic and did not yet think about literature, and scattered writings, published in newspapers and magazines in parallel with the works as a laboratory in which to test characters and themes. My research examines the writer's complete work according to a chronological order. Starting from the first art work of 1919 and arriving at the last story of 1985, I demonstrated how "historical" and invented stories are filters for reworking her own life. Key to this thesis is the question "who am I?" disseminated in all the works analyzed, to protect a story of the self that I have opened. [edited by Author]