This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .
Fogazzaro was very attentive to the ideation of female characters, to deconstructing misogynistic clich & eacute;s. The essay investigates the manifestations of psychological violence on women in Fogazzarian narrative. In the tales, there are many cases of pressure and tension in the family environment: the repudiation of daughters who do not conform to the expectations of the 'Padreterno' father ('Fedele', 'Il testamento dell'Orbo da Rettorgole' ['The Peasant's Will']); the psychological warfare suffered by the woman who returns to the family home following a marital crisis (Un'idea di Ermes Torranza ['An Idea of Hermes Torranza']); subjection to brutal life partners (Idillii spezzati ['Broken Idylls']); prejudices about women's education (Un'idea di Ermes Torranza, Malgari). The essay also focuses on Piccolo mondo moderno ['The Man of the World']; in this novel the female protagonist, Jeanne, faces the trauma of living with a 'vicious husband'. Fogazzaro's delicacy in dealing with this situation is remarkable.This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Comics offer a compelling medium for bearing witness to experiences of trauma, particularly in cases of gender-based violence. Through the interplay of images, text, and colour, comics can convey layered, affective narratives that move beyond depersonalized accounts. Io so’ Carmela is a striking example of this potential: a graphic biographical novel based on the diary of Carmela Cirella, a teenager who took her own life following multiple assaults. This article analyses the visual and verbal strategies used to represent Carmela’s story, reflecting on the power of comics to reframe female experiences of abuse. It argues that comics can function as a form of aesthetic witnessing, engaging readers with the wider consequences of gender-based violence. In doing so, they create a space for reclaiming agency and give voice to victims whose stories are often silenced or overlooked. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .
This study takes as point of departure the current discourse on the intersection between positivist science and literature in the late nineteenth century, as well as contemporary studies on sexuality and sexual trauma. It analyses a selection of short stories from Luigi Capuana’s collection Le appassionate and considers the role that nineteenth-century emergent sciences were playing in the consolidation/definitions of notions of femininities and masculinities and the challenges they posed to prior normative conceptions of gendered sexuality. It argues that the recurrent depictions of sexual violence and subjection in Le appassionate produce a complex portrayal of tensions and signs of rupture within the normative conception of gender roles and that the representation of malady does much more than just symbolize a punishing return to a prescriptive order. Focusing on female acts of resistance and on the kind of agency given to the female voice, it shows how Capuana’s representations of female neuroses reveal social and psychological malaise and become expressions of dissonance to the prevailing nation-building political, social, and cultural project for liberal Italy. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .
This article explores how the dynamics of patriarchal domination are exposed in the works of Maria Messina. In her narratives, Messina reveals the less obvious manifestations of patriarchal power and establishes a correlation between the exploitative, oppressive, and violent nature of the patriarchal system and the relentless pursuit of wealth accumulation in a mainly rural, proto-capitalist society, such as Italy - Sicily in particular - was in the early twentieth century. Building on recent scholarship that challenges reductive definitions of Messina as 'Verga's pupil' or 'the Sicilian Mansfield', the article then discusses Messina's position as a female writer in relation to her literary forefathers and in relation to the feminist movement. While her narratives are not overtly feminist, they provide a compelling critique of the symbolic order and power structures that condone violence against women, thus placing Messina among those twentieth-century female writers who open up the possibility for a post-patriarchal concept of the human to emerge.This article was published open access under a CC BY-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/.
The rich production by Guendalina Lipparini Roti (b. Terni, 1862; d. Pisa, 1914), who signed her works under the pseudonym Regina di Luanto, has only recently received critical attention. The author of short stories, novels, and plays, she became the interpreter of a fierce condemnation of the high society she was part of, first in Rome and then in Tuscany. Central to her literary efforts was an interest in the corruption of habits and in women’s new roles in society. Despite the innovative and courageous message, such themes, treated with modern audacity, did not spare her from the strong criticism of her contemporaries. The profiles of women that emerge from her pages are particularly strong and unprejudiced, but more or less overt acts of violence always underlie their attitudes. It is not only physical but also psychological violence, the aggression that comes from male disregard and contempt, which become detonators of extreme situations. A ‘soundtrack’ often serves as a backdrop to these stories: between the lines of her writings, an allusive music skilfully draws a picture of the environment, which is realistic but also finely rich in semantic references. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .
In the final months of 2023, gender-based violence, domestic abuse, and femicides were brought to the forefront of Italian discourse in an unprecedented capacity following the murder of Giulia Cecchettin. Coincidentally, alongside this discursive resurgence, these themes featured at the core of two films that were released in the same period: C'& egrave; ancora domani (2023) by Paola Cortellesi and Misericordia (2023) by Emma Dante. The article analyses how both films portray gender-based violence and the patriarchal oppression that the characters have to endure. Furthermore, it examines silencing acts as manifestations of patriarchal control within the films specifically, and more broadly as indicative of a lack of education about gender-based violence in Italy. At the same time, the article argues that both C'& egrave; ancora domani and Misericordia break this silence, promoting a counter-education for the women in the films and for their audiences.This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
This essay examines two narrative texts by Livia De Stefani through the lens of gendered violence, focusing on its symbolic and epistemic dimensions and on how violence operates as a spectral and culturally legitimized presence within literary discourse. Through close readings of the short stories 'Fughe nel palazzo' ['Escapes in the Palace'] and 'Il marchese di Fontesecca' ['The Marquis Fontesecca'], the analysis reveals how De Stefani employs estrangement, fantastic motifs, and non-mimetic modes to expose and deconstruct hegemonic paradigms of representation. The essay argues that De Stefani's writing not only foregrounds the invisible frameworks that sustain symbolic and epistemic violence - particularly in relation to gender - but also reclaims literary writing as a critical tool for reconfiguring models of world representation. In doing so, her work contributes to a broader understanding of literature's role in mediating, legitimizing, and potentially dismantling hegemonic paradigms.This article was published open access under a CC BY-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/.
This article examines how contemporary Italian children's writers and illustrators engage with creative reimaginings of canonical fairy tales to challenge entrenched gender stereotypes and address the pervasive social plague of violence against women. Focusing on Guia Risari's La strana storia di Cappuccetto Blu, illustrated by Cl & eacute;mence Pollet, and Lorenzo Naia's Fiabe in rosso, illustrated by Roberta Rossetti, I explore how their visual and narrative strategies create space for empathic reflection on these pressing issues. Drawing on feminist fairy-tale scholarship and picturebook theory, the analysis shows how these works complicate the gendered predator-prey dynamic embedded in classic fairy tales. By placing them in conversation with the pioneering episode 'Il segreto di Fata Lina' from the acclaimed Italian children's television programme La Melevisione, these picture books are interpreted as part of a broader cultural effort to cultivate emotional literacy and gender awareness in young readers, aiming to support the development of healthy relationships and contribute to the early prevention of gender-based violence.This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Through the analysis of five case studies, this article investigates how early twentieth-century Italian newspapers reported violence against women. The descriptions of the circumstances, of the people involved, of their emotions, and of the use of specific words are loaded with stereotypes and prejudices, and contribute to manipulating events, making violence something predictable, understandable, or even acceptable. Consequently, perpetrators are portrayed sympathetically, while victims are subjected to scrutiny and blame. By a close examination of the interaction between language and ideology, this work demonstrates that the press, far from being a neutral observer, is an active participant in the reproduction and enforcement of the patriarchal order. This article was published open access under a CC BY-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ .
This article discusses System of Systems ( Viala/Manicom 2023 ), a 22-minute visual narrative which I co-created with video artist Jean François Manicom. It experiments with strategies for telling time speculatively, with the aim of inviting the audience to experience the continuity and reality of deep time while inhabiting an endangered planet. I chose to move away from both the traditional methodology of the academic essay, and from that of the documentary film that prevails in impact-related academic work in the UK. The film tells the story of the Anthropocene from the perspective of transatlantic slavery, considering the latter as the inception of a model of production which combined genocide and ecocide to make profit, and contributed to the creation of a lifestyle driven by the consumption of commodities and estranged from nature. Drawing on Black feminism and decolonial ecology, the protagonist of the film understands that environmental damage became irreversible when the model of society trialled in the plantation became globalized, one in which the exploitation of human life and earth’s resources to the point of exhaustion has been the condition for continuous economic growth. Setting the story in the Plantationocene, on a Caribbean island where high levels of environmental toxicity challenge the protagonist’s views of the meaning of life and death, allowed me to contextualize sustainability, habitability, and accountability in a socio-environmental ecosystem which mirrors today’s agonizing post-industrial, fossil-fuel-addicted modes of production and consumption across the world. It also empowered me to open the debate on human extinction/survival to the broader question of making kin, through the protagonist’s reconnection with non-human figures, such as an Orisha from the Santería religion or non-vertebrate marine species of the Caribbean Sea.
That Annie Ernaux intends her writing as a work of sociology is well established. Yet while much has been made of the role of photographs in that sociological project, comparatively little attention has been paid to Ernaux’s concomitant interest in sound. The allusions to songs, singers, and song titles strewn throughout Les Années [ The Years ] form part of an effort within the work, and elsewhere in Ernaux’s oeuvre, to document – or rather record – the soundscape of the author’s life. Since the songs cited in Les Années are specific to Ernaux’s milieu, i.e., twentieth-century France, they present a distinct challenge for her translators. Considering a few examples of song allusions in Les Années , I ask how these might be translated into English, how they have been translated by Ernaux’s most recent translator, Alison L. Strayer, and what the impact of Strayer’s translation is on the project of Les Années.
If Vian’s writing has been described as ‘jazzy’ – and one appropriate translation strategy is to ‘jazz it up’ – how might we conceive of a ‘jazzy’ approach to translation? Using Stanley Chapman’s translation of Vian’s L’Ecume des jours – Froth on a Daydream – this paper will explore that question through analysis of a number of challenges that Vian’s ‘jazz writing’ (as a case study) poses to the translator. Finally, in the sense that the translator is – like a jazz musician – ‘elaborating or playing palimpsestically over that which is already composed’ (Michael Jarrett), what can ‘jazz translation’ tell us about the translator as creator, as original artist in their own right?
‘Some of These Days’ appears frequently in La Nausée , and is, the protagonist imagines, sung by ‘une Négresse’. It is likely, however, that Sartre was familiar with the recording by Sophie Tucker, a Jewish Ukrainian American vaudeville and blackface songstress known as the ‘last of the red-hot mamas’. This article reads La Nausée alongside work on ‘blacksound’. It thus moves beyond an analytic that considers the mus(e)ical role that the song plays only in terms of gender by reframing the (mis)hearing – of Sophie Tucker’s blacksound – as fundamental to the function of the song in the narrative. Thus it both insists on the constitutive role of blacksound (as ‘the sonic and embodied legacy of blackface performance’) in Roquentin/Sartre’s existential musings and foregrounds the value of analysing the implied audibility of ostensibly ‘silent’ literary works to better understand the role that sound/music plays in the construction of whiteness and its continued domination.
Song plays an integral part in our formation of memories as well as modes of their recollection through association. The cultural values and language affiliated with songs also mean that they perform a key function in shaping our sense of identity. This article examines the use of song in Annick Kayitesi-Jozan’s testimony Même Dieu ne veut pas s’en mêler [‘Even God Doesn’t Want to Get Involved’], which was published thirteen years after her first collaborative testimony with Albertine Gentou. Comparative analysis between Kayitesi-Jozan’s first co-authored work and her self-authored second testimony reveals extensive differences in terms of chronology and incorporation of Kinyarwanda and Rwandan cultural references. Central to these changes is the inclusion of songs in Kinyarwanda. Examination of their lyrics in the source language and in translation uncovers Kayitesi-Jozan’s volition to retell her story as she remembers it that, by extension, redresses the epistemic imbalances present in her first work.
Romain Rolland’s roman-fleuve , Jean-Christophe (1904–1912), was described by its English translator, Gilbert Cannan, as ‘the first novel of the twentieth century’. Jean-Christophe can indeed be seen as a foundational modern novel, given its lengthy introspective narrative style, its exploration of the genesis of artistic creation, and the impressive depiction of a fictional composer and imaginary music, foreshadowing Proust’s Vinteuil in À la recherche du temps perdu and Adrian Leverkühn in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus . This article considers the profound, though often nebulous, encounter between music and literature in Jean-Christophe . However, rather than focus on musical aspects of the novel which have received some critical attention already, such as the parallels between Jean-Christophe and Beethoven, or aspects of Wagnerian music drama, this article elucidates a neglected musico-literary encounter in Jean-Christophe . It explores the role and representation of Jean-Christophe’s Lieder in relation to the Franco-German cultural context from which they emerged.
Close readings explore three works by Marie NDiaye in which song plays a crucial role. The nature of the song and the singer differs in each text. In La Naufragée [‘The Shipwrecked Woman’], the power of the song of an unattractive sirène (a woman-fish) is expressed through a complex ekphrasis featuring the paintings of J. M. W. Turner. In Un pas de chat sauvage [‘A Wild Cat’s Step’], a nineteenth-century singer is re-created by a twenty-first century avatar. One of her songs is identified but the nature of the others emerges from the historical context, documented in the text. In Mon coeur à l’étroit [ My Heart Hemmed In ], traditional songs call back an estranged daughter to her mother. These dense texts reveal a struggle for control between singer and audience and a racialized tension, both exposed and overcome by the power of music to cut across prejudice and cultures.
The closing decades of the nineteenth century saw degeneration become a privileged medical metaphor for articulating concerns about the changes brought on by industrialization and colonization. A similar dynamic affected evolutionary theory, which became a prime battleground as soon as it entered popular imagination. Degeneration and Darwinism resonated in 1870s Spain as the country grappled with its reduced geopolitical status as a waning empire. National decline was conceptualized as a debilitating collective condition. This study explores the discursive entanglement of Darwinism as degeneration in two short stories, Carlos Coello's 'Hombre y animales' ['Men and Animals] (1878) and Jos & eacute; Fern & aacute;ndez Brem & oacute;n's 'Gestas o el idioma de los monos' ['Gestas or the Language of Monkeys'] (1872), which pathologize the British Empire and condemn its rival for having traded civilization for colonial ambition. Both are satires on evolutionism featuring foreign scientists who through unethical experiments blur the boundaries between humans and animals, with disastrous results.
Fever is a disease of heat and burning - the body's natural thermostat going awry. Yellow fever, a viral infection transmitted by the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, remained an intensely feared and poorly understood disease until 1881, when Cuban physician Carlos Finlay announced it was transmitted by an insect vector. This essay traces the z igzagging peregrinations of yellow fever, from its origins in West Africa to Cuba (via the transatlantic slave trade), then from Cuba to Spain (via global commercial routes), and later southward to Buenos Aires (via Brazil). It examines the multiple meanings of the disease - be they mythic, metaphoric, or ideological - particularly through its entanglements with class, race, geography, and empire. Focusing on three port cities stalked by yellow fever throughout the nineteenth century - Havana, Barcelona, and Buenos Aires - it explores how artists imagined and represented the disease, elucidating the historical situations out of which they sprang, as well as offering a compelling example of what Susan Sontag theorizes as the uses and abuses of illness as metaphor. By mapping artistic depictions of yellow fever from different periods and places, the essay engages with the disease's intimate links with globality, inequality, and empire.
