Laura Anne Salsini

Lucy Taylor

Matilde Serao's richly detailed narratives created a metamorphical city of women negotiating the social and cultural byways of turn-of-the-century Italy. With each text, Serao (1856-1927) added another stratum to her imaginary metropolis, grounding her works in realistic detail and acute social observation. Over the course of almost thirty novels, more than one hundred short stories, and innumerable newspaper articles, Serao articulated her own vision of female destiny in a society governed by traditional, often restrictive, paradigms of female behavior. This study examines how Serao refashioned traditional genres throughout her long literary career, a narrative strategy that allowed her to focus specifically on the depiction of female experiences.

Female Experiences and Narrative Patterns in the Works of Matilde Serao

Gendered Genres

Women writers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy reinvigorated the modern epistolary novel through their re-fashioning of the genre as a tool for examining women's roles and experiences. Addressing the Letter argues that many epistolary novels purposely tie narrative structure to thematic content, creating in the process powerful texts that reflect and challenge literary and socio-cultural norms. Through the lens of the genre, Laura A. Salsini considers how the works of authors including the Marchesa Colombi, Sibilla Aleramo, Gianna Manzini, Natalia Ginzburg, and Oriana Fallaci highlight such issues as love, the loss of ideals, lack of communication and connection, and feminist ideology. She also analyses what may be the first woman-authored Italian example of epistolary fiction: Orintia Romagnuoli Sacrati's Lettere di Giulia Willet (1818). In their reworking of the epistolary narrative form, Italian women writers challenged dominant assumptions about female behaviours, roles, relationships, and sexuality in modern Italy.

Laura Anne Salsini

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