Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing Poetics of Becoming

This book explores what, if anything, defines women’s writing in Italy’s long 1970s. Through a Deleuzean lens, it examines how four leading Italian women poets – Elsa Morante, Amelia Rosselli, Patrizia Cavalli, and Biancamaria Frabotta – develop a poetics of becoming that resists simplistic categorization. ‘Making original use of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of "minor literature" and its power to shift boundaries and enable new forms of becoming, Roberto Binetti reads the work of Italian women poets who transform the contours of lyric poetry and its political valencies. An exemplary account of how new lyric voices can break down binary oppositions while finding different forms of subjectification and self-representation.’ – Jonathan Culler, Cornell University Poetics of Becoming: Women’s Poetry in Italy’s Long Seventies explores the work of Elsa Morante, Amelia Rosselli, Patrizia Cavalli, and Biancamaria Frabotta, examining how their poetry redefined lyric subjectivity in 1970s Italy. Engaging with feminist theory and cultural history, the book interrogates the category of scrittura femminile and its limitations, considering how these poets navigated questions of political agency, heterodox experimentalism, and marginalization within a male-dominated literary canon. Through close readings and comparative analysis, it highlights their responses to the feminist movement, postwar Italian politics, and philosophical debates. The study argues that their poetry enacts a process of ‘becoming’, destabilizing fixed identities and expanding the boundaries of lyric expression as a site of both resistance and renewal. Poetics of Becoming reimagines the relationship between gender, politics, and poetics, offering a new framework for understanding women's poetry in modern Italy.