Gender Writing Spectatorships

<p>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 <i>admiration </i>among performers and writers – the embodiment of a vibrant mobile and successful Italian female culture industry during the first wave of feminism. </p>