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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.
This is the first book which gives a general overview of women as subject-matter in Italian Renaissance painting. It presents a view of the interaction between artist and patron, and also of the function of these paintings in Italian society of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Using letters, poems, and treatises, it examines through the eyes of the contemporary viewer the way women were represented in paintings.
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.
This book explores how women's relationship with food has been represented in Italian literature, cinema, scientific writings and other forms of cultural expression from the 19th century to the present. Italian women have often been portrayed cooking and serving meals to others, while denying themselves the pleasure of the table. The collection presents a comprehensive understanding of the symbolic meanings associated with food and of the way these intersect with Italian women's socio-cultural history and the feminist movement. From case studies on Sophia Loren and Elena Ferrante, to analyses of cookbooks by Italian chefs, each chapter examines the unique contribution Italian culture has made to perceiving and portraying women in a specific relation to food, addressing issues of gender, identity and politics of the body.
Italian Women at War explores Italian women's participation in war and conflict throughout Italy's modern history, beginning with the Unification and ending with the twentieth century. The essays in this volume, help to further the discussion on women's participation in violence, warfare, and political protest throughout Italy.
This feminist anthology from Italy offers an enriching perspective on cinema studies. Focusing on women’s engagement with political theory and film-making, the book never loses sight of the female experience of cinema. It examines how women have chosen to represent themselves and how they have been represented, and how they deal with the cinematic apparatus, as subjects of production, objects of representation, and spectators. A variety of approaches are offered, ranging from psychoanalysis and semiology to history. With an exhaustive filmography, this anthology of chapters by eminent theorists demonstrates the central importance of recent developments in Italy for the whole spectrum of film and feminist studies.
With the rise of mass tourism, Italy became increasingly accessible to Victorian women travellers not only as a locus of artistic culture but also as a site of political enquiry. Despite being outwardly denied a political voice in Britain, many female tourists were conspicuous in their commitment to the Italian campaign for national independence, or Risorgimento (1815–61). Revisiting Italy brings several previously unexamined travel accounts by women to light during a decisive period in this political campaign. Revealing the wider currency of the Risorgimento in British literature, Butler situates once-popular but now-marginalized writers: Clotilda Stisted, Janet Robertson, Mary Pasqualino, Selina Bunbury, Margaret Dunbar and Frances Minto Elliot alongside more prominent figures: the Shelley-Byron circle, the Brownings, Florence Nightingale and the Kemble sisters. Going beyond the travel book, she analyses a variety of forms of travel writing including unpublished letters, privately printed accounts and periodical serials. Revisiting Italy focuses on the convergence of political advocacy, gender ideologies, national identity and literary authority in women’s travel writing. Whether promoting nationalism through a maternal lens, politicizing the pilgrimage motif or reviving gothic representations of a revolutionary Italy, it identifies shared touristic discourses as temporally contingent, shaped by commercial pressures and the volatile political climate at home and abroad.
This book considers cultural representations of four different types of labor within Italian and U.S. contexts: stories and songs that chronicle the lives of Italian female rice workers, or mondine; testimonials and other narratives about female domestic servants in Italy in the second half of the twentieth century (including contemporary immigrants from non-western countries); cinematic representations of unwaged household work among Italian American women; and photographs of female immigrant cannery labor in California. These categories of labor suggest the diverse ways in which migrant women workers take part in the development of what Antonio Gramsci calls national popular culture, even as they are excluded from dominant cultural narratives. The project looks at Italian immigration to the U.S., contemporary immigration to Italy, and internal migration within Italy, the emphasis being on what representations of migrant women workers can tell us about cultural and political change. In addition to the idea of national popular culture, Gramsci's discussion of the social role of subalterns and organic intellectuals, the politics of folklore (or 'common sense') and everyday culture, and the necessity of alliance-formations among different social groups all inform the textual analyses. An introduction, which includes a reconsideration of Gramsci's theories in light of feminist theory, argues that the lives of subaltern classes (such as migrant women) are inherently connected to struggles for hegemony. A brief epilogue, on a lesser-known essay by photographer Tina Modotti, closes the discussion.
Italy’s 1948 constitution states that Italy is a ‘republic founded upon work’. This book explores women’s labour following World War Two and Italy’s new republic. It focuses its enquiry on three sectors: agriculture (rice weeders), fashion (seamstresses), and religious work (nuns). It studies original oral history interviews and compares women’s own words with their representation in film. In Italy, both war and national reconstruction have typically been framed as masculine undertakings. This book shifts that frame to investigate the labour that Italian women were doing at this critical time of political, social, and ideological change. By examining (filmed) oral history interviews and postwar fiction films, the book brings a vivid, engaging, and cross-disciplinary account of women’s work. Historical studies of Italian women’s work in this period are scarce, short, and almost never in English; this work addresses that critical gap. Film histories almost invariably study women for their beauty and on-screen sexuality; this work critiques and moves beyond this bias. Oral history studies aim to give voice to the under-represented; this book shares that goal. The book is interested in how women’s work was viewed by society and by women workers themselves. Critical analysis of films produced between 1945 and 1965 reveals tensions around women workers’ financial, sexual, intellectual, and spatial independence. Oral histories reveal little-discussed professions and women’s experiences in the workplace. These interviews expose the profound difference work made to women’s lives, and the joys and dilemmas of this difference.
This volume brings together specialists from a variety of disciplines to develop a deeper understanding of the social, political, and cultural history of women in Italy in the years 1946-1960. Despite being a time when women and the family were at the center of national debates, and when society changed considerably, the fifteen years following the Second World War have tended to be overlooked or subsumed into discussions of other periods. By focusing on the experience of women and by broadening the frame of reference to include subjects and sources often ignored, or only alluded to, by traditional analyses, the essays in this volume break new ground and provide a corrective to previous interpretive models.