Sulle tracce di Elena Ferrante: questioni di metodo e primi risultati

This chapter illustrates the implementation of quantitative analysis methods on a corpus of modern Italian novels aimed to shed light on the identity of Elena Ferrante, the pen name of a very successful novelist whose real identity is still unknown. After a review of previous attempts conducted according to different approaches (based on lexical, contextual and thematic factors), in order to offset the impact of diatopic varieties of Italian the seven novels written by Elena Ferrante have been compared to 39 novels written by ten authors from Campania (Ferrante’s region of origin) according to two methods: correspondence analysis and intertextual distance. Both methods show that Elena Ferrante’s novels are more similar to Domenico Starnone’s works than to the novels of any other author included in the corpus. In addition, a lexical analysis shows that, compared to the other authors, Ferrante and Starnone share the greatest number of lexical items used exclusively in their novels. Conclusively, the qualitative and quantitative approaches used in this study confirm that a similarity emerges between the novels published by Ferrante and Starnone after the early 1990s and paves the way to further research based on larger corpora of fiction as well as non-fictional texts.