«Come una zanzara verso la luce». Limiti materiali e corpi porosi nella poesia di Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

This paper examines Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ’s (1797-1848) nature writing from a perspective that has received little attention so far: the inter- play between her ecological poetics and her ambivalent representations of gendered embodiment. While rediscovered by feminist criticism in the 1970s and more recently recognized by German ecocriticism for her consistent de-centering of the human subject, Droste remains virtually unknown in the Italian academic and publishing context. I argue that her Naturlyrik not only displaces the human but also foregrounds the materiality of the (female) body as both a limit and a sensory threshold to the natural world. Drawing on new materialist ecofeminist concepts such as trans-corporeality (Alaimo), intraac- tion (Barad), and porosity (Tuana, Iovino), I propose a new reading of embodiment in Droste’s work. This approach reveals how her poems place the body and the material specificity of the lyrical subject at the center, while simultaneously dissolving boundaries between body and environment – a porous becoming that destabilizes hierarchical relations and gestures toward alternative forms of coexistence and kin-making (Haraway).