Nel nome della madre

The experience of maternity imbues the narrative of Italian authors of the late 19th century, and it weaves together the personal experiences of these authors with those experiences that they have invented for the protagonists of their narrative worlds. Thus it becomes a means of reconstructing the scattered fragments of a feminine cultural heritage, and for recovering the original language of maternity, the node of intersection between the real and the symbolic. This study has a dual purpose: to restore a voice to some Italian writers overlooked by the official literary canon, and to observe the way in which their literary invention reflects the gradual shift of maternal experience from a purely oblative function to a more conscious and reasoned modality of experientation.