Autobiografia e autobiografismo in Karen Blixen. Una lettura contrastiva di Out of Africa e delle lettere “africane”

The main aim of this article is to challenge the interpretation of Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa as a sample of autobiographical or memorialistic writing, and to highlight its connections to ethnography and epic. By means of a contrastive analysis of the literary work based on Blixen’s experience as a European farmer in Kenya and the private epistolary written during her seventeen-year-long stay in Africa, the present study investigates the writer’s stylistic choice of depersonalization and aims to understand the profoundly elusive and hybrid nature of the text, at the same time distant from the imperative of reporting and from introspection.