This original study makes a valuable contribution to Italian feminist/women’s history, spectatorship studies, and cultural history by examining women as protagonists, producers and consumers of literature, theatre, opera and film. Drawing on archival material – female correspondence, life-writings and journalism – as well as an impressive range of canonical texts, it brings together detailed engagement with female performance and with female spectators’ material responses to "women’s opera...

The late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries witness significant advancement in the production and, crucially, the consumption of culture in Italy. During the long process towards and beyond Italy becoming a nation-state in 1861, new modes of writing and performing – the novel, the self-help manual, theatrical improvisation – develop in response to new practices and technologies of production and distribution. Key to the emergence of an inclusive national audience in Italy is, however,...

Post-Unification Italy saw an unprecedented rise of the middle classes, an expansion in the production of print culture, and increased access to education and professions for women, particularly in urban areas. Although there was still widespread illiteracy, especially among women in both rural and urban areas, there emerged a generation of women writers whose domestic fiction and journalism addressed a growing female readership. This study looks at the work of three of the most significan...