How to Cite

Tuzzi, Arjuna, Mikros, George and Cortelazzo, Michele A.: Applying General Impostors Method to the Ferrante Case, in Hesselbach, Robert et al. (Eds.): Digital Stylistics in Romance Studies and Beyond, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2024, p. 299–313. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.1157.c19377

License (Chapter)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Identifiers (Book)

ISBN 978-3-96822-200-4 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-96822-201-1 (Hardcover)

Published

08/07/2024

Authors

Arjuna Tuzzi , George Mikros , Michele A. Cortelazzo

Applying General Impostors Method to the Ferrante Case

Abstract Elena Ferrante is the nome de plume of an anonymous writer who is highly successful on the international stage and whose success far exceeds that of other authors of contemporary Italian literature. In this study, we approach Ferrante’s authorship investigation as a verification problem since we cannot be sure whether the real author behind Ferrante’s pseudonym is among the can­didates we have considered in previous studies. For this reason, we applied the General Impostors (GI) method using the Cosine Delta distance in both a cor­pus of 150 novels written by 40 authors (39 candidates and Elena Ferrante) and a non-literary corpus of 113 texts signed by 14 different entities (12 authors, a collective author, and Elena Ferrante). In the literary corpus, Starnone emerged as the most likely author of Ferrante’s novels. Results were quite different in the second case: Starnone was not the only possible author since, in many non-liter­ary texts, Raja, Martone as well as the E/O publishing house staff and publish­ers, seem to have authorial contributions. The GI method not only confirmed previous results but also improved our knowledge of this case since it provides a measure of the attribution strength.

Keywords: Ferrante, authorship verification, stylometry, General Impostors method