Abstract: Contemporary accounts of motherhood, as they emerge from the pens of authors ranging from Natalia Ginzburg to Simona Vinci, from Anna Maria Ortese to Elena Ferrante, deal with the conflict that every woman has to face in order to respond to the omnipresence of stereotypes imposing the weight of old roles in a society that has now undergone profound change. Risk then becomes the key to inaugurating a new theoretical, literary and existential discourse on the feminine, pushing the gaze beyond the abyss, pointing to failure and catastrophe as a dimension of the possible.
