ItalianWoolf · Virginia Woolf and Italian Readers
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-09-01 → 2021-12-01
- EU contribution
- €224,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
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Results in brief
Virginia Woolf and Italian Readers
The research project ‘Virginia Woolf and Italian Readers’ aimed to understand how Virginia Woolf has been received in Italy and what steps her reception has taken to make a cultural icon of her. The project employed an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on English literature, reception and periodical studies and publishing history, and its first objective was to trace the waves of the Italian reception of Woolf, from her first appearance in the pages of the newspaper “La Stampa” in 1926 to today. The second objective was to highlight the social, cultural and institutional factors that shaped editorial policies surrounding Woolf’s work. I considered the importance of Woolf for the Italian public and publishing market and examined how her image has evolved through years both in the eyes of the critics and of the reading public. The Italian cultural-historical events served to understand the reasons for her reception and for the editorial choices made by publishers. In the monograph I am writing I illustrate 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 examined the Hogarth Press fund held at the University of Reading and a series of Italian publishers' and translators' archives; I also interviewed the key agents of the translation and publication of Woolf in Italy. By investigating the scattered traces of Woolf in publishers’ and translators’ archives, I shed light both on the work of cultural mediation of translators and series editors and on the economic and social factors influencing publishers’ choices. In order to facilitate research for the scholarly community, the key output of this project is an open-access digital and searchable database collecting all bibliographical references of articles, books, reviews on Woolf and all translations of Woolf’s works that have appeared in Italy, which will serve as a research tool for scholars, students and passionate readers. The Database is available here: https://italianwoolf.reading.ac.uk/
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
This project examines the reception of Virginia Woolf in Italy and it will lead to the first multi-media comprehensive study of her reception in Italian culture. Employing an archive-based interdisciplinary approach drawing on reception studies, periodical studies, publishing history, the project will trace the waves of her reception, from Fascism to the present. To do so, it will examine the key stages of Woolf’s reception in relation to the political, cultural and institutional factors that influenced publishers and translators over the years and it will map out the publishers, translators, and cultural gate-keepers that patronised Woolf’s works in the Italian context. The project will focus on the censorship mechanisms put in place by Fascism and how Woolf translators challenged them; the circulation of Woolf works in the post-war Neorealist phase; the role her work played in the rise of the Italian feminist movements in the 1970s; and finally how, since the late 1990s, the reception of the transmedial adaptations of her work consolidated Woolf as a cultural icon in Italy. In addition to traditional scholarly outputs, this project will create a digital open-access database which will serve as a research tool for scholars, students and the lay public. Woolf’s work will be considered a litmus test for key moments of change in the Italian cultural industry. The study of Woolf’s Italian reception will, in turn, contribute to the growing scholarly interest in the reception of Anglophone Modernist writers in European literary marketplaces by embracing the recent calls to globalise the reach of Anglophone modernism and by affirming how peripheral and context-specific concerns help to reconsider the adaptability of modernist innovations and to question the idea that transfers occur in a friction-less cultural vacuum. To this end, the Italian case will offer substantive methodological concerns and empirical evidence to rethink the framework of global modernism studies.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE UNIVERSITY OF READING · ReadingCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union