Who Does Elena Ferrante Look Like? A Revised Stylometric Identikit Cover Image

A chi assomiglia Elena Ferrante? Un profilo stilometrico aggiornato
Who Does Elena Ferrante Look Like? A Revised Stylometric Identikit

Author(s): Michele A Cortelazzo, Arjuna Tuzzi
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Translation Studies
Published by: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek
Keywords: Elena Ferrante; contemporary Italian literature; authorship attribution; similarity measure; text clustering

Summary/Abstract: Based on a corpus including 150 novels by 40 authors, a stylometric survey was conducted to assess which modern authors were similar to Elena Ferrante, the pen name used for eight novels, including "My Brilliant Friend" (Tuzzi & Cortelazzo 2018a and 2018b). The survey proved that Elena Ferrante’s writing style is remarkably different from that of the other main contemporary Italian novelists with the notable exception of Domenico Starnone. Follow-up studies (Cortelazzo, Mikros & Tuzzi 2018 and another under way) show that non-fiction works signed by Elena Ferrante may be attributed to different authors, i.e., Anita Raja, Starnone again, and a collective author including the staff of the E/O publishing house. This study complements the results obtained by previous research by assessing Elena Ferrante’s role in modern Italian fiction following the publication of her latest novel, "The Lying Life of Adults". In addition, the analysis of her similarities to Domenico Starnone was enhanced by means of a larger corpus of his novels, thus corroborating the outcome of previous research.

  • Issue Year: 11/2020
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 123-141
  • Page Count: 19
  • Language: Italian