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  • Introduction:Friendship and Scholarship
  • Tiziana de Rogatis (bio), Stiliana Milkova (bio), and Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (bio)

This special issue was born out of the interweaving of our personal and professional stories, at the intersection of our different mother tongues and acquired languages, homelands, and disciplinary backgrounds. An Italian-Neapolitan scholar in Italy, a Bulgarian scholar in the United States, and a German scholar in the United Kingdom, we found a common ground through the study of Elena Ferrante and on the pages of a 2016 volume of the Italian scholarly journal Allegoria. Our institutional affiliations around the world, our nomadic identities straddling several countries, regional landscapes, and languages, and our cultural differences exemplify in many ways the global effect of Elena Ferrante's writing.

This effect for us is double. Thanks to Elena Ferrante, we forged a strong friendship informed by profound respect, generosity of spirit, and intellectual affinity. Our friendship generated a turn, or a transformation, in our established research trajectories. The study of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, of T.S. Eliot and Montale, of Beckett and Gadda yielded the rewards and insights of a feminine and feminist author who challenges the entrenched masculine literary and academic canon. Despite and thanks to our different national, linguistic, and cultural identities, as female scholars we recognize and empathize with the marginalization, liminality, and powerful creativity of women depicted in Ferrante's novels. [End Page 3]

Our friendship has been productive and gratifying in many ways. After organizing a three-day seminar at the ACLA convention (2017), three panels at the AAIS conference (2018), and an international conference at Durham University (2019), we arrived at this special issue of MLN dedicated to Elena Ferrante in a global context. Although we have continued to publish individually on Ferrante, our collaborations have enriched our personal perspectives and opened new ways of seeing and reading.

While important contributions to Ferrante Studies have been and continue to be made by both male and female critics, this volume includes a polyphony of approaches and orientations that issue from the voices of female scholars. This selection was in no way programmatic, but it reflects the current reality in which the majority of Ferrante scholars are women.

In this spirit, female friendship can be an empowering, ground-breaking practice when used to include and promote the voices of other women. This special issue synthesizes our individual and collective scholarly trajectories by bringing together female scholars from around the world to examine Ferrante's writing through a diverse, interdisciplinary lens, underscoring its cosmopolitan, transnational dimension. All of the female authors in this issue offer extensive knowledge of their disciplines and of Ferrante scholarship in both English and Italian, reading and citing Elena Ferrante in both languages.

When discussing Ferrante, we are aware that her writing and her anonymity have not only been the object of great enthusiasm but also of a strong resistance and intolerance. When reading or reflecting on her work, we are always dealing with her appeal to the myriad of women's existences, to their ability to creatively work through the trauma inflicted by frantumaglia and smarginatura. That is why the most in-depth and visionary discourses on Ferrante have been in fact articulated by hybrid voices capable of reconciling lived experience and scholarly research; voices which in some parts of our global academic world are marginalized. And like these voices, the author's heritage is hybrid and transversal. Ferrante is already a classic of our contemporary global imaginary and as such carries an extraordinary capacity for inclusivity. [End Page 4]

Elena Ferrante in a Global Context opens with a programmatic theoretical essay by Tiziana de Rogatis, which supplies the framework for understanding Ferrante's works as globally relevant. In the first section, "Global Framework," Emanuela Caffè studies the Neapolitan Novels as trauma narratives, expanding the definition and etiology of trauma itself. Stiliana Milkova shows how Ferrante revises the postmodernist trope of the labyrinth, while Rebecca Walker discusses Ferrante's global poetics of fracture and contends for Lila and Elena as shattered subjects. Enrica Ferrara employs the lens of agential realism to argue for Ferrante's posthuman subjects. In the second section, "Global Network," Katrin Wehling-Giorgi, Rossella...

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