Il perturbante come strategia sovversiva: realismo magico ed elementi fantastici nei Racconti sardi di Grazia Deledda

Abstract

This paper discusses the absence of Grazia Deledda both in Spanish university curricula and on the Spanish publishing market, an oblivion shared by other female authors of her time. This exclusion has a dual cause: the writers’ gender and the literary genre they cultivated. In this study, I offer a new reading of Deledda’s Racconti sardi (1894) through a critical analysis of its architectural elements, resonating with magic realism and the fantastic genre. These elements fit within the aesthetics of the liminal (Tomassini, 1992), which seeks to reinterpret the history of otherness as opposed to normative and legitimised histories. While magic realism proposes a world tailored to the experience of the other, which belies the official truth, the fantastic highlights the flaws of the uniform conception of reality. Such narratives may convey a subversive, albeit often overlooked, message as the mechanisms of the genres of the non-real promote readers’ estrangement, a revision of the contract of fiction and, therefore, multiple levels of reading. These accomplishments make Deledda a classic author whose narrative production, which starts from the local to become universal, is worth continual re-reading.