Oriana Fallaci: The Rhetoric of Freedom

Oriana Fallaci (b. 1930) is an awkward presence on Italian bookshelves, in world journalism and among feminists. This book, the first literary study of Fallaci, examines the implications of the storms and silences that she keeps rousing. A fully emancipated and successful woman in the man's world of political journalism, she has antagonised many feminists by her championship of motherhood and her idolization of heroic manhood. In journalism, her critics have felt that she has outraged the conventions of interviewing and reporting. As a novelist, she shatters the invisible diaphragm of literariness and is accused of betraying, or simply failing, literature. This book focuses on Fallaci's direct engagement as a writer with major political and social issues such as women's liberation, Vietnam, Islamic fundamentalism and the space programme. A distinctive and controversial feature of her writing is the way in which she blurs the interface between reportage and fiction in an attempt to obliterate the gap that separates the word from the world.

John Gatt-Rutter Vaccari is Professor of Italian Studies, La Trobe University, Australia