Contemporary Italian Women Writers and Traces of the Fantastic

Contemporary fantastic fiction particularly that written by women often challenges traditional literary practice. At the same time the predominantly male-authored canon of fantastic literature offers a problematic range of gender stereotypes for female authors to 're-write'. Fantastic tropes of space in particular enable three important contemporary Italian female writers (Paola Capriolo b. 1962; Francesca Duranti b. 1935 and Rossana Ombres b. 1931) to encounter and counter anxieties about writing from the female subject. All three writers begin by exploring the hermetic fantastic space of enclosure with a critical or troubled eye but eventually opt for wider national and often international spaces in which only a 'fantastic trace' remains. This shift mirrors their own increasingly confident distance from male-authored literary models and demonstrates the creative input that these writers bring to the literary canon by redefining its generic boundaries.