Colmare il vuoto con "parole di luce": l'immaginazione come oggetto poetico in Elsa Morante e Anna Maria Ortese

This thesis is about the way imagination is themed in the short stories that Anna Maria Ortese and Elsa Morante wrote in their youth: in such collection of texts, this work studies the literary forms given to imagination in stylistic and thematic terms, paying particular attention to the links between imagination and the poetic creed of the two authors, as well as their authorial postures. The main focus is on Ortese’s debut book of short stories, “Angelici dolori” (1937), almost entirely forgotten by the critical discourse on the author. Then, taking “Angelici dolori” as a reference point, some short stories from Morante’s first collection “Il gioco segreto” (1941) are examined, along with other early short stories Morante published only in literary magazines and with some other texts she composed at the time but are still unpublished. If read one next to the other, the first narrative attempts of the two writers reveal a strong similarity in the representation of imaginative processes and in the choice of using non-mimetic stylistic codes. Thereby, Ortese and Morante shape a literary project which is, for both, rooted in the coexistence of different perspectives of truth. Very often, indeed, what’s imagined makes up the dominant part of the short stories’ plots or becomes the most decisive element to determine their meaning. Thanks to this epistemological reversal, in "Angelici dolori" and in "Il gioco segreto" imagination becomes a realm of liberation and deep knowledge of oneself, other than a means of consolation in the face of a miserable and disappointing reality. After an analysis of Ortese and Morante’s positioning in the Italian ‘literary field’ in the 1930s, carried out using Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological method, the second and the third chapter of this thesis deal with the issue of imagination through the scope, respectively, of representation of childhood and of forms of erotic desire, in accordance with and in contrast to the tradition of romantic love.