The Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini (review)

Abstract

Despite Dacia Maraini's prodigious production--novels, plays, poetry collections, films, and countless critical essays--the literary establishment has largely ignored the Italian feminist. The essays collected in this volume firmly and eloquently position Maraini within the canon by highlighting the extraordinary range of her work while exploring the feminist ideology informing her texts. Many facets of her production are examined; the essays are arranged in sections that view her texts through a framework of genre studies, feminist liberation ideology, historiography, and theories of subjectivity. While these essays address and employ theoretical positions ranging from semiotics to psychoanalysis, they remain refreshingly free of jargon and are therefore accessible even to nonspecialists. The volume has been attentively edited: the essays exhibit a consistency of tone often difficult to achieve in a collection of such disparate approaches.