Retrieving or Revising? Using Mythology in Contemporary Italian Literature against Femicide

Abstract

This paper investigates two contemporary Italian novels on the topic of femicide (femminicidio) -Undicesimo comandamento (2011) by Elena Mearini and Padreterno (2015) by Caterina Serra -drawing on feminist insights that consider practices of both revising and retrieving mythology as an opportunity to start a process of resymbolisation that could challenge patriarchal discrimination and violence. In particular, Mearini's decision to re-write the Christian myth of the cross in order to tell the story of a woman annihilated by her partner's violence and Serra's use of the Greek myth of Aristaeus to retrieve a story of femicide told by a male offender who undertakes a process of self-awareness will be considered as part of the same contemporary Italian tendency to tackle lethal gender violence against women by means of literary representations and storytelling.

Feminist Literary Criticism Meets Feminist Theology: Yashodhara and the Rise of Hagiographical Fiction in Modern Feminist Re-visioning

“…It is a stance that defines writing about women in terms of an essence. Recent studies focusing on mythology such as those focusing on Medusa (Kapoor, 2021), Italian mythology (Mandolini, 2021), or Greek mythology (Sen, 2020) continue the tradition of drawing attention to the methodology of re-visioning.…”