Reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels with the Grain. The View of a Female Academic from Southern Italy

The global success of Elena Ferrante’s quadrilogy L’amica geniale, known in Anglophone countries as the Neapolitan Novels, has recently directed the interest and debates of critics, and the more general public, to the question of why it appeals to readers of different ages and genders from very different cultures. This chapter elucidates the quartet’s transformative potential, an all-important concern in view of both Ferrante’s phenomenal success globally and the common understanding that ‘reading does have an impact on who we are and what we will become’. Ferrante has succeeded in something that is not easy to achieve, combining creativity, complexity and readability: her work occupies that middle ground between high literature for the elites and popular culture for the masses, which can trigger desires and promote change by addressing that middlebrow readership that is receptive to the cognitive and emotional reading experience that such a literature has the power to spark.