SOURCE: "The Island Motif in the Works of Grazia Deledda, Elsa Morante, and Anna Maria Ortese," in Proceedings of the XIIth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, Vol. 3, Roger Bauer, Douwe Fokkema, and Michael de Graat, eds., iudicium verlag, 1990, pp. 275-80.

In the following excerpt from a paper presented at the twelfth congress of the International Comparative Literature Association in 1988, Marras discusses the island motif and Ortese's investigation of human nature in The Iguana.

Novels by Grazia Deledda (1871–1936), Elsa Morante (1918–1986), and Anna Maria Ortese (born in [1914]) are major instances of Italian modern prose writing. When comparing Deledda, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926, Morante, and Ortese, important distinctions should be made with regard to the author's style and view of the human condition, yet some continuity can be traced between the works of the three women writers, while each one's approach to life and...