ABSTRACT
Ortese's paradigm is taken up by one of the youngest and most successful women writers on the Italian literary scene, Paola Capriolo.3 Capriolo shares Ortese's preoccupation with the boundaries between mythical structures and everyday life. The 'architecture' of Paola Capriolo's stories underlines mysterious meanings in an attempt to recapture Ortese's perfect fusion of the realistic and the fantastic. Capriolo explores the realm of fantasy both at the level of the fabula and at the psychological level, extending her exploration to psychosexual events and to the metaphysical dimensions of the mind. Although Paola Capriolo and Anna Maria Ortese belong to very different generations, their writing shares similar themes, structures and literary conventions. Like the other writers selected for this study, they pursue strategies of 'mythic revisionism',4 through which their work acquires philosophical depth and symbolic import.
