Profiling Elena Ferrante: A look beyond novels

Elena Ferrante represents rather a peculiar editorial and journalistic phenomenon: Today, she enjoys a wide international audience, though, on the other hand, there is surprisingly little scientific literature that discusses her works. Since Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym for an anonymous writer, some investigators have already dealt with the pursuit of her real identity and, at the moment, the main suspects that emerged are Domenico Starnone, Marcella Marmo and Anita Raja. Corpora collected in order to analyze Elena Ferrante's works and compare them with the works of other authors are usually composed of novels, however Marcella Marmo and Anita Raja are not novelists and their works are not ascribed to genres comparable with novels. One of Elena Ferrante's books, La Frantumaglia, is useful to collect corpora of texts of different genres (letters, essays, interviews, etc.) and they might include texts by authors that have never been taken into consideration in research studies based on novelists. Nevertheless, these texts raise specific questions that concern their exploitability in traditional authorship attribution procedures due to their limited size. This study aims at working on a corpus of texts other than novels by means of a machine learning approach, in the frame of methods for authorship attribution and profiling.