This book is the first critical interdisciplinary examination in English of Italian women’s contributions to intellectual, artistic, and cultural production in modern Italy. Examining commonalities and diversities from the country’s Unification to today, the volume provides insight into the challenges that Italian women engaged in cultural production have faced, and the strategies they have deployed in order to achieve their objectives. The essays address a range of issues, from women’s self-identification and public ownership of their professional roles as laborers in the intellectual and cultural realm, to questions about motherhood and financial remuneration, to the role of creative foreign women in Italy. Through critical analysis and direct testimony from new and typically marginalized voices, including an Arab-Italian writer, an Italian-Dominican filmmaker, and a transgender activist, new forms of ongoing struggle emerge that redefine the culturally diverse landscape of female intellectual and creative production in Italy today. The volume rethinks a solely national “Made in Italy” reading of the subject of female intellectual labor, demonstrating instead the wide network of influences and relationships that have existed for Italian women in their professional aspirations.

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-siecle 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-siecle 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.

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-siecle 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-siecle 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.

Performing Bodies: Female Illness in Italian Literature and Cinema (1860-1920) explores the variations in the portrayal of female illness in Italian fin de siecle literature and early cinema. Catherine Ramsey-Portolano begins her study with an overview of nineteenth-century theories on female inferiority and nervous disorders, especially hysteria. 19th-century European scientific and philosophical discourse on women's bodies, which focused on female biological functions and malfunctions, accompanied an abundant fin de siecle literary representation of female illness, a theme which also carried over into the cinematic genre of diva films of the 1910s. Ramsey-Portolano's analysis of fin de siecle Italian literary texts first discusses those novels in which illness represents the consequence and at times punishment for women who transgressed traditional societal roles and norms of behavior. Ramsey-Portolano also demonstrates, however, that there also existed within a portrayal of female illness which suggested sickness as a form of agency for women. Rather than depicting women as powerless victims who succumb to illness due to the pressures and limitations of patriarchal society, this second group of novels posits illness as a means for women to take control of their bodies and demonstrate self-mastery through illness as a chosen form of behavior. Performing Bodies: Female Illness in Italian Literature and Cinema (1860-1920) concludes with a discussion of the role of female illness in Italian cinema of the 1910s. Ramsey-Portolano analyzes the films Tigre reale (1916) and Malombra (1917), featuring the divas Pina Menichelli and Lyda Borelli, to show how illness granted centrality to the female character. By placing the diva and her point of view at the center of the film's action, these films posit the female character as the active one in advancing the story, thus providing a progressive model for female Italian viewers and an early example of the female gaze in Italian cinema. Performing Bodies: Female Illness in Italian Literature and Cinema (1860-1920) examines how in Italian literature and film, as well as in society, women were confined to traditional roles and illness often represented the consequence for transgressing those roles. Feigning illness offered women a way to "own" the illness and become manipulators and masters not only of their bodies but of their stories and destinies.