“A Perfect Heroine in Foreign Travel.” Female Mobile Identities and Southern Italy in the 19th Century Non-feminist Periodical Press

2016

This essay focuses on the inteaction between the publication of female travel writing abouth the South Of Italy in non -feminist 19th century British periodicaldìs and the circulation of a transgressive model of femininity centred on the concepts of mobility, vitality and visibility. the choice of Southern Italy, and anti-tourist destination that since the era of the Grand Tour had been considered dangerous for men, let alone for women, magnifies female heroic attitudes and contaminates female conventional domestic purity enhancing the concept of an unfixed female identity. The publications of a travelogue, a mostly non fictional genre, on an innovative and reactive medium, was a manifest a…

Silenzi e parole. L'esercizio dell'autoaffermazione femminile in Orgoglio e Pregiudizio

2015

The essay focuses on the main character of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bennet, who possesses beauty, virtue and intellect and who uses silence, historically intended as a form of gender and social repression imposed by the social system to women, discoursively constructed as an essential component of women's behaviour and social experienced, and aimed at silencing them, as an instrument to path to her auto-assertion. The young woman, through her strategical discoursive skills based both on words but especially on silence tells the story of a heroine who must learn, over the course of her narrative, how to harness the powers of discoursive sophistication in order to circum…

Rambling in Sicily: Hybrid Mobility and Liminal Identities in Early Nineteenth Century Periodical Writing

2020

The essay focuses on the interaction between the discoursive patterns of Rambles in Sicily, in 1816. By an Artist, a travelogue published anonymously from 1817 to 1818 in The New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register, and the development of a hybrid travelling identity centred on a concept of mobility that oscillates from seeing to acting. Travelling in Sicily between the decline of the Grand Tour and the birth of mass tourism seems to lead to an identity construction encouraged by the polychromatic nature of the place travelled. The travelogue is deemed «a private account of an authentic and autobiographic experience of mobility in a public space» (Liedke 2018: 6). The concept of the tra…

Donne altrove. Viaggi, scrittura periodica e identità nell'Ottocento inglese

2015

The book focuses on the usage and publication of travelogues by 19th century women travellers to the colonies of the Empire as tools for spreading a new female identity based on courage, strenght, adventurous attitudes, in brief, based on all those features on which male identity had governed the economic, social, political and cultural areas, and last but not least, suffocated the so called 'fragile' gender. the travelogue, that is the writing of a a non fictional travel experience by women, to and in place such as the colonies, considered as the uncivilised and dangerous side of the Empire gave women the possibility to develop and perform their own selves as authoritative, mobile and powe…

Introduzione

2013

"Akhila felt within her a queer itinerant sensation". Ladies Coupé:'new' literatures and new feminisms

2005

"La perfezione della facoltà selvaggia". Ologrammi coloniali nell'opera di Harriet Martineau

2005

Gli Inglesi in Cina. Harriet Martineau tra tradizione e innovazione

2012

La ristampa di The English in China. A Tale by Harriet Martineau (1832), qui per la prima volta anche in traduzione italiana, permette di approfondire il significato che la short story assume, fin dai primi decenni del secolo, di agente di trasformazione culturale in virtù della relazione privilegiata che il racconto stabilisce con il periodico che ne accoglie i significati, il Tait’s Edinburgh Review. Legato ancora parzialmente agli stilemi propri del novel, ma proiettato verso quei paradigmi tematici e formali che caratterizzeranno il racconto di fine secolo , Gli Inglesi in Cina. Un racconto di Harriet Martineau in-forma il lettore sia sul progetto di smantellamento del vecchio ordine ec…

Palermo strana e meravigliosa. Lo sguardo inglese e la Golden Shell nella stampa periodica d'Ottocento

2013

Questo volume mette a fuoco le interconnessioni che durante il XIX secolo legano la scrittura odeporica inglese, la pubblicazione e la diffusione del periodico e la rappresentazione della città di Palermo. I resoconti di viaggio analizzati sono pubblicati su alcuni dei periodici britannici più popolari in un arco di tempo che va dal 1800 al 1900, periodo in cui la quasi totalità dei travelogue racconta un itinerario di cui Palermo rappresenta solamente una tappa e che prevedeva la visita dell’intera isola, iniziando e concludendo il percorso nella capitale, o Messina, e proseguendo l’itinerario passando per Alcamo, Calatafimi, Segesta, Erice, Enna, Calatnissetta, Canicattì, Girgenti (l’odie…

Charlotte Perkins Gilman e Virginia Woolf: creativita e compiacenza nella fenomenologia dell'informe

2007

L'articolo mette a fuoco il significato che, in relazione alla costruzione del proprio sè, la follia e la scrittura hanno avuto per Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) e Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), le realizzazioni testuali delle quali sembrano essere state tra loro in continuo dialogo. Abattendo le barriere tra generi di diversa natura, tanto la produzione narrativa, in particolare le short stories, quanto quella saggistica rivelano la propria essenza di spazio testuale finalizzato alla formulazione di una costruzione identitaria che, una volta emanicipata dal tradizionale schema patriarcale, brillasse di luce propria. Scrittura e 'follia' si rivelano in un rapporto di continua e produtti…

"Eastern Life.Past and Present". L'Oriente di Harriet Martineau tra etnocentrismo e relativismo culturale

2007

Il viaggio di Louis Golding in Sicilia

2010

Nel contesto della scrittura odeporica che, tra fine Otoocento e primi del Novecento, ha come protagonistoa una delle più importanti, e al contempo, discusse isole del Mediterraneo, "Magdalen in Sicily", breve resoconto di viaggio di Luois Golding in Sicilia pubblicato nel 1925 su English review, si rivela sia 'object oriented' sia subject oriented'. Se da un lato affonda le proprie radici discorsive nelle scritture di viaggio di secondo Ottocento sulla frontiera imperiale, proponendo modellizazioni razziali tipiche di quei resoconti, dall'altro, il travelogue riprende una problematica cara all'Inghilterra di fine Ottocento, la degenerazione, ricontestaluizzandola in un periodo che segue la…

Viaggia(u)tori inglesi in Italia. la 'culla della civilta'' nelle rappresentazioni del Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. 1850-1900

2008

Following the concept of culture expressed by Williams, the idea of the text identified by McEnzie and the theoretical developments of Colonial Studies and New Historicism, the essay aims at identifying the discoursive paradigms through which the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Review textualizes, from 1850 to 1890, the encounter between British ‘viaggia (u) tori’ (travellers and authors at the same time) of the second half of the XIX century and Italy with particular reference to the configuration of the spaces and identity of the Other. The travelogues analysed, which had a wide diffusion according to the spread of the Victorian periodicals during the century, despite focussing on Italy without com…

From Missionary to Military Discourse: Economic Expansion and Rhetorical Shifting in the Nineteenth Century Adventure Story

2010

The essay aims at establishing the nature of the relationship between the development of the 19th century adventure story, the systematization of colonial enterprise and rise of imperialism and the construction of the concept of Britishness intended as a superior and missionary identity category. The analysis of Marryat’s Masterman Ready (1842), Ballantyne’s Coral Island (1857), Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1882) and Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) will show how the rhetorical pattern of the 19th century adventure story, with particular reference to space and characters, goes through transformations in accordance with the economic transitions the system undergoes shifting from mission…

'Climbing Untrodden Paths and Unfrequented Passes'. De-Generation in 'The Buddhist Priest's Wife' by Schreiner, 'A Cross Line' by Egerton and 'The Un…

2013

This essay aims to show how different forms of de-generation in the social construction of fin de siècle female identity prove to be intentional instruments to defy conventional 19th century femininity and generate and circulate new female discoursivities in order to integrate forms of transgression into socially accepted behaviours. As critics have long argued the New Woman -the modern woman emerging from the disruption of the Angel in the House stereotype- has to be treated as a discursive process and a multilayered subject. The analysis of Schreiner’s “The Buddhist Priest’s Wife” (1891), Egerton’s “A Cross Line” (1893), and Grand’s “The Undefinable: A Fantasia” (1894), will highlight the…

Post(-)colonialism: "A Strange Modernity that Moves forward by Going backward".

2006

Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Racconti di silenzi e di anarchie

2008

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), one of the greatest female figures of social, cultural and literary fin-de-siècle history, is generally mentioned for her wide contributions given to the feminist movement during the first decades of the XX century. The narrative traits of some of her short stories, collected in the volume also in their Italian translation (all of them but “The Yellow Wallpaper” are the first Italian translation), are of great value in so far as they are closely linked to contemporary age both from a thematic and formal point of view. The short stories, besides focussing on crucial aspects of the trans-formation of the gender relationship, are instrumental in interrupti…

Supernatural Elements in kipling's 'The Mark on the Beast', Conan Doyle's 'Lot no 249' and Wells' 'The Truth About Peycraft': The Gothic Short Story …

2013

The aim of the essay is the analysis of the supernatural elements in Kipling’s ‘The Mark on The Beast”, Conan Doyle’s “Lot no. 409”, Wells’ “The Truth about Peycraft” conceived of as the expression of the revitalisation of the Gothic imagery which, through the Short Story, serve to voice and exorcise late Victorian crisis, de-Constructing late Victorian identity. First, the complex nature of late Victorian Britain crisis will be deepened; second, the short story will be focused on as an independent genre from the novel which mostly epitomized Fin de Siècle literary fantastic discourse; finally, the short stories will be investigated as textual examples of what Brantlinger defines as Imperia…

Anti-heroism and Intercultural Hints in David Charles Badham's Travel in Sicily

2009

The paper analyses the discursive features of Charles Badham's travelogues in Sicily in the context of the XIX century Travel Writing development. The travelogues are peculiar in their textual hybridity, blending some of the traditional discursive paradigms of the late Grand Tour travelogues and some of the conventional categories of the exploration and scientific accounts on the imperial frontier proper of the second half of the XIX century. In Badham's travelogues the informational components and a clear subjectiveness of his experience co-exist; far from articulating heroic attitudes, Badham's travelgues deploy an intercultural approach rather than, in Pratt's words (1985), a "monarch-of…

Ologrammi e stereotipi coloniali nell'opera di Harriet Martineau

2006

The volume aims at deepening the discoursive modalities through which Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) relates to the complex nature of the economic, political, social and cultural period in which she lives and identifying the interrelations and discontinuities her work shows with regard to the relationship the writer has with Alterity. Textual peripheries rather than what may be considered the centre of the literary domain, demonstrate how colonial representations follow the evolution of the economic and political pattern which marks the passage between commercial and industrial colonialism. Specifically, textual spaces belonging to the first half of the century establish what I identified as…