Morante, Elsa(ĕl`sə môrän`tā), c.1912–85, Italian novelist and poet; wife of Alberto MoraviaMoravia, Alberto
, 1907–90, Italian novelist, b. Alberto Pincherle; husband of Elsa Morante. Moravia is considered one of the foremost 20th-century Italian novelists.
..... Click the link for more information. . Her prose style, which is indebted to surrealismsurrealism
, literary and art movement influenced by Freudianism and dedicated to the expression of imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and free of convention.
..... Click the link for more information. and magic realismmagic realism,
primarily Latin American literary movement that arose in the 1960s. The term has been attributed to the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, who first applied it to Latin-American fiction in 1949.
..... Click the link for more information. , is characterized by the clear presentation of unreal events and always stresses the power of the imagination. The themes of solitude and loneliness are central to House of Liars (1948, tr. 1951), Arthur's Island (1957, tr. 1959), and the poems in Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini (1968). Morante's most important work, History: A Novel (1974, tr. 1977), which recounts Italy's wartime history through the eyes of a poor Roman family living in the ghetto, shows history to have violent and pitiless effects on the lives of common people. Morante also published the dark novel Aracoeli (1982), a collection of essays, a book of short stories, and a children's book.
See biography by L. Tuck (2008).