Here is where I introduce my project, my aims and all the amazing things I look forward to doing in the next 24 months thanks to my Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship at the University of Reading.
First of all, maybe many of you do not know what a Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship is (I will call it MSCA most of times). You can of course have a look at the website of the Action, but if you’re not an expert in European Grants and in Academy, and yet you are a Woolf ‘groupie’, let me just tell you that the MSCA-IF is a Grant through which the European Union enable organisations such as universities or research centres to host talented foreign researchers and to create strategic partnerships to carry on interdisciplinary and intercultural research.
MSCA fellowships are among Europe’s most competitive and prestigious awards, aimed at supporting the best and most promising scientists.
This is the reason why I am so proud to be a MSCA Fellow and I will do my best to share my research goals and successes, as well as my ideas, along the way. So, first of all,
What is my project about?
My research project examines the reception of Virginia Woolf in Italy, exploring translations, reviews and publications of her work, as well as articles and books. The Italian cultural-historical events on the background of her publication will serve to understand the reasons for her reception and for the editorial choices made by publishers, illustrating in which ways fascist censorship prevented her dissemination in the marketplace, what role her work played in the rise of the feminist movements of the 1970s, and how the popularisation of her figure helped her to become a cultural icon in Italy.
I will thus consider the importance of Virginia Woolf for the Italian public and publishing market, and examine how her image has evolved through years both in the eyes of the critics and in the eyes of the reading public.
Employing an archive-based interdisciplinary approach – drawing on reception studies, periodical studies, publishing history – the aim of my project is to trace the waves of the Italian reception of Woolf in Italy, from her first appearance in the pages of “Il Corriere della Sera” in 1927 to today, and to create a digital database which will serve as a research tool for scholars, students and passionate readers.
It will collect and give access to reviews, articles, paratexts, academic articles and monographs that have appeared on Woolf in Italy. The initial interest Woolf enjoyed in cultural periodicals, despite the harsh cultural climate of fascism, suffered during the politically-engaged intellectual climate of the post-World War II period, but a renewed interest in her sprung with the first translation of Three Guineas in 1975, which revealed a politically committed writer to the Italian reading public. The publication of her works in the consecrating Meridiani series by Mondadori in 1978 set her canonical status in Italy, and her publication by independent, mainly feminist, publishers contributed to her popularization.
Interest in her has kept growing and this project will show how her figure is still able to play a cultural and political role in the consolidation of women awareness in Italy.
Virginia Woolf in Italy
The Italian reception of Virginia Woolf has been the object of my research for many years.
In 2007 I published the volume Il paese della bellezza. Virginia Woolf nelle riviste italiane tra le due guerre which examined the reception of the writer in Italian literary periodicals under fascism, and it gathered the transcriptions of all the Woolf-related articles published in Italy from 1927 to 1945, so to be of service to other scholars. My second monograph, L’indimenticabile artista. Lettere e appunti sulla storia editoriale di Virginia Woolf in Mondadori (2015) evaluated the unpublished documents at the Mondadori archive to illuminate the first translations of Virginia Woolf published in Italy. This study espoused the view according to which publishers’ archives are indispensable to achieve a “greater sense of the comparative and contingent nature of literary production, as well as the wider networks of the marketplace to which author and publisher respond”[1] and it used the hitherto neglected documents to “reveal the negotiations that have taken place between the process of literary writing on the one hand […] and the processes of circulation and the social uses of literature on the other”[2].
The work shows how Mondadori’s decision-making process on the dissemination of Woolf during the Second World War contributed to outline the image we have of Virginia Woolf in Italy today. My study did not, however, feature a specific examination of the materials held in other publishers’ archives. Works like Lisa Jaillant’s Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon[3] have shown the influential role played by book series in the dissemination of Modernist writers in the marketplace both in the past and in the present day. Drawing from such work I will investigate translators’ and publishers’ archives and funds to understand the reasons behind the publication of Woolf in specific series and collections. Moreover, the Italian reception of Woolf in literary periodicals, academic journals, cultural magazines and media after 1945 has never been analysed, while it is a fundamental element in reception history.
This research project will thus fill these considerable gaps in the Italian reception of a leading figure of English modernism.
My project has two really excellent ‘supervisors’: Daniela La Penna, associate professor of Italian literature and Head of the Department of Languages and Culture at the University of Reading, with a huge experience in archive and periodical studies, and Nicola Wilson, associate professor of English Literature with a strong experience in publishing history and Woolf studies. Two mentors from which I look forward to start learning!
[1] N. Wilson, Archive Fever: The Publishers’ Archive and the History of the Novel, in New Directions in the History of the Novel, ed. by P. Parrinder, A. Nash, and N. Wilson, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 85.
[2] U. Raulff, Grand Hotel Abyss: Towards a Theory of the Modern Literary Archive, “Comparative Critical Studies, 8, 2011, 2-3, p. 163.
[3] L. Jaillant, Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: the Modern Library Series, 1917-1955, London, Pickering & Chatto, 2014.
[4] N. Luckhurst, Introduction, in The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe, p. 15.