Ann Hallamore Caesar

About town: The city and the female reader, 1860-1900

The period after Italian Unification saw a marked increase in the volume of publications, magazines and books intended specifically for a female readership which was made up of girls and married women. It also saw the rise of the professional woman writer and journalist. Drawing on two of the most popular genres, the novel (in particular the domestic novel) and conduct literature, this article examines their representations of the city and urban life. It notes that while the physical transformation of major towns and cities was bringing in its wake far-reaching changes to the experience of urban life, the literature for women treats the city as an almost entirely abstract entity with few distinctive characteristics. Instead, the focus of these writings is on the drawing up of rulebooks designed to enable women to negotiate urban life without bringing opprobrium to bear on themselves or their families

WOMEN READERS AND THE NOVEL IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

Abstract In the second half of the nineteenth century the growing interest shown by painters and their patrons in a more intimist subject matter found expression both in the representation of new themes and settings and in the re-elaboration of established subjects. Included among the second group were paintings of female readers. In religious art there had long been an association between women and books: for example, scenes of the Annunciation often depicted the Virgin Mary holding or looking up from a book which, according to St Bernard, narrated the prophecy of Isaiah foretelling the birth of Christ. Paintings of St Anne also traditionally included a book and in Counter-Reformation art in particular Mary was often shown being taught to read at her mothers knee. In secular painting the figure of the woman reader appeared through the Renaissance and successive centuries in a variety of contexts ranging from the rich milieux of aristocratic palaces to the enclosed spaces of the convent. Then, in the second half of the nineteenth century we find a renewed interest in the figure of the female reader stimulated by the presence on the art-market of a recently empowered middle class who began to adopt reading as one of the ritualistic poses for female portraits. Like the aristocracy before them, the middle classes used portraiture to suggest the wealth and social standing of the family: social markers that could be conveyed through the sitters dress and through her surroundings, be they the family salotto or the gardens or terrace of a semi-rural villino.

Gender, Narrative and Dissonance in the Modern Italian Novel

reportage (Lettere d’una viaggiatrice and Nel paese di Gesù. Ricordi di un viaggio in Palestina). Sambuco reveals Serao’s strategy that, although engaged in transgressive activities for a woman of her time (her profession as a journalist and writer who traveled alone far from home), mitigates her scandalous potency by underscoring Italy’s cultural hegemony and the contributions of artists like eleonora duse to affirm national prestige from abroad. Italian Women Writers, 1800–2000. Boundaries, Borders, and Transgression is a current and interesting study, rich in elaborate biographical references that propose original perspectives on the concepts of limits and transgression in female writing. the volume offers a precious spark for further reflections and research in the field of female contributions to the national history and culture.

Theatre and the Rise of the Italian Novel: Venice 1753–84

Abstract The essay discusses the rich and complex relationship that was played out publicly in eighteenth-century Venice between a well-established theatre and a newly emerging indigenous novel. Two of the key figures, Pietro Chiari and Antonio Piazza, had a foot in both camps; their ‘theatre novels’, far from having story lines purloined from plays, were thinly disguised or undisguised narratives about the off-stage rivalries and relationships between the actors and actresses, playwrights and impresarios that made up the leading theatre companies. These were, themselves, in rivalry with each other. Chiari and Piazza were journalists as well as novelists and playwrights and, at different moments, editors of the local paper Gazzetta veneta. The potential to draw the dominant cultural practice of the day into a circuit of gossip, scandal, and celebrity was considerable. But one finds also in Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi, whose careers do not follow the same route, a similar heightened awareness of the divergent demands being made on them by different sectors of the reading and theatre-going public.

History or pre-history? Recent revisions in the eighteenth-century novel in Italy

The rise of the modern Italian novel is traditionally associated with the publication of Alessandro Manzonis / Promessi sposi (The Betrothed) between 1825 and 1827, but recent critical attention has turned to the presence of the indigenous novel in eighteenth-century Venice. A short-lived phenomenon, alongside theatre it dominated Venetian cultural life between 1750 and 1780 and it is associated with two former playwrights, Pietro Chiari and Antonio Piazza, turned novelists. While at one level the eighteenth-century novel owes its rediscovery to a new interest in readerships and reading practices, at another it is the outcome of a wish to free the birth of the novel of associations with nation-building and nationhood.

THE BRANDING OF WOMEN: FAMILY, THEATRE AND FEMALE IDENTITY IN PIRANDELLO

Abstract Its funny about identity. You are because your little dog knows you. Gertrude Stein, Everybodys Autobiography At the beginning of Act II of Trovarsi, the play that Pirandello wrote for Marta Abba in 1932, there occurs an extraordinary episode. Donata, the heroine, is shown examining the bite-marks that her lover Elj gave her when he rescued her in the high seas after their boat capsized. His claim, which is supported by her doctor, is that they are a testimony to his struggle to save her life.