Chair: Marianne Van Remoortel
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Dario Boemia
Challenging the territories of literariness: The reviews of Neera‘s novels in the Corriere della Sera (1883–1900)
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, in Italy as in the rest of Europe there was a flowering of women storytellers. (Muscariello 2018) The growth of the printing industry, newspapers and periodicals supported this flourishing, because women found in journalism an accessible profession that positively influenced their writing, bending it towards the chrism’s of a readability that benefited the vivacity and ease of their prose, both chronicle and narrative. According to Spinazzola, two exemplary 'personalities' of this phenomenon are Matilde Serao (1856-1927) and Neera (Anna Maria Zuccari, 1846-1918). (Spinazzola 2018). Much has been written about Serao (Schilardi 1986, Franchini-Soldani 2002, Bezari 2018) but little about Neera and her novel-writing and journalistic activities. (Pucello 2007, Scaravilli 2018) The critics of the Corriere della Sera followed with interest the numerous publications of the Milanese writer, pointing out practically all of them and reviewing the most interesting ones. (Pischedda 2011) Luigi Capuana dealt with Addio! (1877) and a few years later Un nido (1880), Il marito dell’amica (1885) was reviewed twice within a few months, both by Carlo Raffaello Barbiera (in July) and Luigi Gualdo (in November) and Emilio De Marchi wrote about Teresa (1886). The purpose is to analyse Neera’s novels reviews that appeared on the Corriere della sera. Combining the tools of literary history, sociology of literature, periodical studies, and gender studies, I will demonstrate that Neera’s literary activity and the critical operation of her most important reviewers, such Capuana, attempt to challenge the territories of literariness, i.e., of what is worthy of being told, thus consequently shifting the centre of the literary field and its peripheries.
References
- C. Bezari, “Representations of the fin-de-siecle literary salon in the chronicles of Matilde Serao”, in Forum Italicum, vol. 52, n. 1, 2018, pp. 35-48
- S. Franchini, S. Soldani, Donne e giornalismo. Percorsi e presenze di una storia di genere, FrancoAngeli, Milano 2002
- M. Muscariello, “Le scrittrici nell’Ottocento italiano”, in Il romanzo in Italia. L’Ottocento, edited by G. Alfano, F. de Cristofaro, Carocci, Roma 2018, pp. 477-488
- B. Pischedda, “La letteratura incolonnata”, in La critica letteraria e il Corriere della Sera, Fondazione Corriere della Sera, Milano 2011, pp. XXXVII-CII
- S. Pucello, “Neera: una scrittrice poliedrica”, in Chaos e Kosmos, a. VIII, 2007
- G. Scaravilli, “Neera, ‘Anima sola’ (1895)”, in Il romanzo in Italia. L’Ottocento, edited by G. Alfano, F. de Cristofaro, Carocci, Roma 2018, pp. 567-569
- W. Schilardi, Matilde Serao giornalista, Milella, Lecce 1986
- V. Spinazzola, Il romanzo d’amore, ETS, Pisa 2017
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Annalisa Federici
“A little article on Queen Elizabeth’s nose for Eve”: Virginia Woolf’s The Waxworks at the Abbey between tradition and modernity
Although scholars have often illustrated the multiple connections between high and low, elite and popular, tradition and modernity in modernist print culture, the enactment of such dichotomies in a women’s commercial magazine like Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial (1921-1929) has not received sustained critical attention. This periodical – aimed to reach a middle-class female readership interested in fashion, household management and society news as well as in the latest trends in literature and the arts – occasionally included features written either by or about modernist women as a way of making room for progressive and unorthodox voices among its conservative columns, which were generally characterised by a thinly veiled promotion of traditional values, patriarchal standards and nationalist viewpoints. This helps to resituate a highbrow and sophisticated writer like Virginia Woolf, whose forays into middlebrow culture have recently attracted critical attention. This paper analyses Woolf’s essay The Waxworks at the Abbey, published in the 23 May 1928 issue of Eve, in relation to other types of printed material (editorials, adverts, articles) in that particular issue as well as in others. Such contents show that the magazine played a key role in the emergence of a contemporary celebrity culture and enacted an interesting tension between the avant-garde and the mainstream, the unorthodox and the conventional, in both the representation of interwar culture and the portrayal of one of its main exponents as a high cultural icon. This attitude seems to be reflected in the subversive and eccentric depiction of great historical figures like English monarchs as ordinary or even ridiculous, attempted by Woolf in her essay. In failing to present history and royalty in a serious or dignified manner, The Waxworks at the Abbey at the same time resonates with and undermines the idolisation evident in Eve’s many high society and celebrity pages, thus providing a counterpoint to the magazine’s usual deference to class and cultural hierarchies.
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Zsuzsa Török
Hungarian Girls’ Culture in the mid-19th century: Flóra Majthényi’s periodical Virágcsokor
Flóra Majthényi (1837–1915), a popular Hungarian poetess of the 1850s and 1860s, edited a short-lived periodical titled Virágcsokor (Bouquet of Flowers) and published it in Pest in 1862. The periodical made extensive use of a fashionable literary trend and consumer phenomenon in the nineteenth-century, the language of flowers. With its columns named after flowers, Virágcsokor targeted a clearly defined readership, young girls. It published poetry, short fiction, translations, news items about the fashionable life in the capital, as well as letters from provincial correspondents. Majthényi’s periodical was the very first Hungarian attempt to reach out to a specific young girls’ audience in the nineteenth century. Accordingly, my paper investigates the various characteristics that has been used to define girlhood on the pages of Majthényi’s periodical. It examines the extent to which a specific reading culture and emotional life of young, unmarried girls has been articulated by the contributors of the periodical, both women and men. For, although a discrete girls’ culture, in which girls experienced some agency through cultural practices, existed in the nineteenth century, girls were still socially marginalized individuals. Moreover, the periodical’s short, only four-month lifespan indicates that the 1860s were not yet a time of fruition for girlhood and a well-established girls’ readership in the Kingdom of Hungary. Notwithstanding, the paper argues that Virágcsokor took a leading role in initiating a social conversation that endeavoured to include the voice of an overlooked group, that of the adolescent girls. Its central aim is to introduce the periodical as intentionally created and conceived as a counter-public in opposition to the hegemonic power of the mainstream press.