Women and Gender in Post-unification Italy

Women and Gender in Post-unification Italy
Author: Katharine Mitchell
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Italy
ISBN: 9783034309967

In the nineteenth century a woman's place was considered to be in the home. During the Risorgimento and the years following the Unification of Italy in 1861, economic, political and social changes enabled women to engage in pursuits that had previously been the exclusive domain of men. This book traces this shift in cultural perception.

Italian Women Writers

Italian Women Writers
Author: Katharine Mitchell
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2014-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442646411

Italian Women Writers looks at the work of three of the most significant women in late nineteenth century Italy whose domestic fiction and journalism addressed a growing female readership.

Italy's Other Women

Italy's Other Women
Author: Danielle Hipkins
Publisher: Italian Modernities
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Motion pictures
ISBN: 9783034319348

In the period 1940-1965 the female prostitute featured in at least 10 per cent of Italian-made films. This book explains why she was so prevalent in Italian cinema of this period and offers a new account of her on-screen presence. The author shows that prostitutes in Italian cinema are much more than simply 'tarts with hearts' or martyr figures.

Italian Women's Autobiographical Writings in the Twentieth Century

Italian Women's Autobiographical Writings in the Twentieth Century
Author: Ursula Fanning
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2017-09-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1683930320

This book highlights the centrality of the autobiographical enterprise to Italian women’s writing through the twentieth century—a century that has frequently been referred to as the century of the self. Ursula Fanning addresses the thorny issue of essentialism potentially involved in underlining links between women’s writing and autobiographical modes, and ultimately rejects it in favor of an argument based on the cultural, linguistic, and literary marginalization of women writers within the Italian context. It is concerned with Italian women writers’ various ways of grappling with constructions of subjectivity throughout the century and sets out to explore them. Fanning reads autobiographical writing as subject to many of the same constraints as fiction and, in doing so, draws attention to the significance of the recurring use of the terms “pure” and “impure” in many critical and theoretical discussions of the autobiographical (where “pure” is used to suggest a truthful representation of a life, while “impure” suggests the messy undertaking of mixing lived experience with fiction). Recurring patterns and paradigms are found in the works of the various writers considered (eighteen in all), and these paradigms are analyzed through close readings of their works. These close readings offer insights into approaches to the constructions of subjectivity in the narratives and are informed by feminist theories. The chapters focus on selves in relationship, taking their lead from the patterns unfolding in the writers’ work, hence the subjects are constructed as daughters (with different views of the self in relation to fathers and mothers), within the confines of the romantic relationship (which involves reconsiderations and rewritings of the romance plot), as maternal subjects, and as writers (with an eye on their relationship to the literary canon, as well as to the relationship with readers). This book argues that there is such a thing as gendered subjectivity and that its constructions may be traced through the texts analyzed.

Representations of Female Identity in Italy

Representations of Female Identity in Italy
Author: Silvia Giovanardi Byer
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2017-05-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443892726

This volume explores a variety of iconic female characters in Italian literature, art and film who depict distinct representatives of female identity within this national culture. The contributors here apply various methodologies to characterize the evolution of women’s identity and their representation in such expressive modalities, drawing from literature, film, drama, history, the humanities, media and cultural studies. Cross-genre, cross-cultural, and cross-national explorations are also utilised here in order to underline the multifaceted ways in which de facto female characterization occurred.

Nineteenth-Century Italian Women Writers and the Woman Question

Nineteenth-Century Italian Women Writers and the Woman Question
Author: Catherine Ramsey-Portolano
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2020-10-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 100019082X

Nineteenth-Century Italian Women Writers and the Woman Question focuses on the literary, journalistic and epistolary production of Italian woman writer Neera, pseudonym for Anna Radius Zuccari, one of the most prolific and successful women writers of late nineteenth-century Italy. This study proposes to bring Neera out of the shadows of literary marginality to which she has long been confined by analyzing her contribution to literary and cultural debates as testimony to the pivotal role she played in the creation of a female literary voice within the Italian fin-de-siècle context. Drawing from the Anglo-American feminist critical tradition; modern Italian feminist theory on the maternal order and sexual difference; and a close reading of Neera’s literary, theoretical and epistolary writings this volume examines Neera’s work from a three-pronged perspective: as promoter of a maternal order in contrast to the existent paternal order, as one of few women writers to participate actively in Italy’s verismo movement and as epistolary correspondent of leading representatives within fin-de-siècle Italian literary and journalistic circles. Nineteenth-Century Italian Women Writers and the Woman Question represents the first monographic volume in English dedicated exclusively to this important Italian woman writer, repositioning her within the Italian literary landscape and canon.

Writing and Performing Female Identity in Italian Culture

Writing and Performing Female Identity in Italian Culture
Author: Virginia Picchietti
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2017-01-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319408356

This volume investigates the ways in which Italian women writers, filmmakers, and performers have represented female identity across genres from the immediate post-World War II period to the turn of the twenty-first century. Considering genres such as prose, poetry, drama, and film, these essays examine the vision of female agency and self-actualization arising from women artists’ critique of female identity. This dual approach reveals unique interpretations of womanhood in Italy spanning more than fifty years, while also providing a deep investigation of the manipulation of canvases historically centered on the male subject. With its unique coupling of generic and thematic concerns, the volume contributes to the ever expanding female artistic legacy, and to our understanding of postwar Italian women’s evolving relationship to the narration of history, gender roles, and these artists’ use and revision of generic convention to communicate their vision.

Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy

Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy
Author: John Champagne
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2013
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0415528623

Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy is an interdisciplinary historical re-reading of a series of representative texts that complicate our current understanding of the portrayal of masculinity in the Italian fascist era. Champagne seeks to evaluate how the aesthetic analysis of the artifacts explored offer a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of what world politics is, what is at stake when something - like masculinity - is rendered as being an element of world politics, and how such an understanding differs from more orthodox 'cultural' analyses common to international relations.