Gender, Writing, Spectatorships: Evenings at the Theatre, Opera, and Silent Screen in Late Nineteenth-century Italy and Beyond

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, theatre and film," placing these in the context of melodrama from the 1880s to the 1920s in Italy, France, the US, and elsewhere. It is unique in its interdisciplinary approach and in its consideration of female relationships based on admiration among performers and writers – the embodiment of a vibrant, mobile and successful Italian female culture industry during the first wave of feminism.

Katharine Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Italian Culture and Gender at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. She is author of Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870-1910 (Toronto University Press, 2014), and among her co-edited volumes are Women and Gender in Post-Unification Italy: Between Private and Public Spheres (Peter Lang, 2013) and Matilde Serao: International Profile, Reception, and Networks (Classiques Garnier, 2022).