AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to millions of articles
from top publications available through your library. In the
last two decades, 19th-century Italian women writers have gained
a much wider audience in American academia. Although women's
studies still have a hard time working its way up in Italian
universities, American scholars have been more and more focusing
their attention on Italian women writers and their literary
legacy. Fundamental novelists such as Marchesa Colombi and Neera
are being translated and studied in the English language, thus
giving them access to a wider public recognition. Looking for
historical and theoretical coordinates, Italian scholars have
been establishing parallels with other Western literary and
social histories. For 19th-century women writers, two works in
particular have become staples of feminist literary histories
since their publication in the '70s: Gilbert and Gubar's
Madwoman in the Attic and Elaine Showalter's A Literature of
Their Own. Although these studies f