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.
