Professor Francesca Conti (professor of SOC 210 Gender in Global Perspectives) interviews Italian Studies Assoc Professor and Program Director, Catherine Ramsey-Portolano, on the publication of her new book Italian Women Writers and the Woman Question: The Case of Neera (2020 Routledge).

Nineteenth-Century Italian Women Writers and the Woman Question focuses on the literary, journalistic and epistolary production of Italian writer Neera, pseudonym for Anna Radius Zuccari, one of the most prolific and successful women writers of late nineteenth-century Italy.

This study proposes to bring Neera out of the shadows of literary marginality to which she has long been confined by analyzing her contribution to literary and cultural debates as testimony to the pivotal role she played in the creation of a female literary voice within the Italian fin-de-siècle context. Drawing from the Anglo-ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ feminist critical tradition; modern Italian feminist theory on the maternal order and sexual difference; and a close reading of Neera’s literary, theoretical and epistolary writings this volume examines Neera’s work from a three-pronged perspective: as promoter of a maternal order in contrast to the existent paternal order, as one of few women writers to participate actively in Italy’s ±¹±ð°ù¾±²õ³¾´ÇÌýmovement and as epistolary correspondent of leading representatives within fin-de-siècle Italian literary and journalistic circles.　

Ramsey-Portolan's interest in Neera began during her PhD studies at the Unversity of Chicago when she chose the writer as the subject of her dissertation and when she began working with Antonia Arslan, the curator of Neera's archive and prolific author on the writer's productions. In her introduction to this volume, Ramsey-Portolano frames the work thus "Nineteenth-Century Italian Women Writers and the Woman Question: The Case of Neera represents the first monographic volume in English dedicated exclusively to this important Italian woman writer, repositioning her within the Italian literary landscape and canon." She goes on to say "Regardless of her accomplishments and the success she obtained in her time, today Neera is a member of what Antonia Arslan has labelled 'the submerged galaxy' referencing the many late nineteenth-century women writers now largely forgotten by critics and public alike." 

This volume will go some way towards re-addressing Neera's status and recognition.