Contemporary Italian Women Poets introduces English-reading audiences to the diversity of contemporary women's poetry in Italy during the past five decades. It includes twenty-five authors whose work has been published since World War II: poets from different generations and regions, some with international acclaim, others known primarily to those within women's literary circles. THE POETS who appear are: Mariella Bettarini, Cristina Campo, Anna Cascella, Patrizia Cavalli, Elena Clementelli, Rosita Copioli,Biancamaria Frabotta, Luciana Frezza, Vera Gherarducci, Margherita Guidacci, Armanda Guiducci, Jolanda Insana, Vivian Lamarque, Gabriella Leto, Dacia Maraini, Daria Menicanti, Alda Merini, Giulia Niccolai, Luciana Notari, Rossana Ombres, Piera Oppezzo, Amelia Rosselli, Gabriella Sica, Maria Luisa Spaziani and Patrizia Valduga. DUAL-LANGUAGE POETRY. Introduction, notes on the poets, bibliography index of first lines.

"Contemporary fantastic fiction, particularly that written by women, often challenges traditional literary practice. At the same time the predominantly male-authored canon of fantastic literature offers a problematic range of gender stereotypes for female authors to 're-write'. Fantastic tropes, of space in particular, enable three important contemporary Italian female writers (Paola Capriolo, b. 1962; Francesca Duranti, b. 1935 and Rossana Ombres, b. 1931) to encounter and counter anxieties about writing from the female subject. All three writers begin by exploring the hermetic, fantastic space of enclosure with a critical, or troubled, eye, but eventually opt for wider national, and often international spaces, in which only a 'fantastic trace' remains. This shift mirrors their own increasingly confident distance from male-authored literary models and demonstrates the creative input that these writers bring to the literary canon, by redefining its generic boundaries."

This is an amazing book, a major achievement in the field of women's studies.--Renaissance Quarterly, reviewing Women's Writing in Italy, 1400-1650

More than a century has now passed since F.T. Marinetti's famous "Futurist Manifesto" slammed the door on the nineteenth century and trumpeted the arrival of modernity in Europe and beyond. Since then, against the backdrop of two world wars and several radical social upheavals whose effects continue to be felt, Italian poets have explored the possibilities of verse in a modern age, creating in the process one of the great bodies of twentieth-century poetry. Even before Marinetti, poets such as Giovanni Pascoli had begun to clear the weedy rhetoric and withered diction from the once-glorious but by then decadent grounds of Italian poetry. And their winter labors led to an extraordinary spring: Giuseppe Ungaretti's wartime distillations and Eugenio Montale's "astringent music"; Umberto Saba's song of himself and Salvatore Quasimodo's hermetic involutions. After World War II, new generations—including such marvelously diverse poets as Sandro Penna, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Amelia Rosselli, Vittorio Sereni, and Raffaello Baldini—extended the enormous promise of the prewar era into our time. A surprising and illuminating collection, The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry invites the reader to examine the works of these and other poets—seventy-five in all—in context and conversation with one another. Edited by the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock, these poems have been beautifully rendered into English by some of our finest English-language poets, including Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, Paul Muldoon, and many exciting younger voices.

Addressing the issue of gender in poetic discourse, this anthology of various 20th-century Italian women poets explores whether or not there can be an aesthetic distinction between male- and female-created poetry.

A monument to the literary genius of women throughout the ages, A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now is an invaluable collection. Here in one volume are the works of three hundred poets from six different continents and four millennia. This revised edition includes a newly expanded section of American poets from the colonial era to the present. "[A] splendid collection of verse by women" (TIME) throughout the ages and around the world; now revised and expanded, with 38 American poets.

In The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena, Konrad Eisenbichler analyzes the work of Sienese women poets, in particular, Aurelia Petrucci, Laudomia Forteguerri, and Virginia Salvi, during the first half of the sixteenth century up to the fall of Siena in 1555. Eisenbichler sets forth a complex and original interpretation of the experiences of these three educated noblewomen and their contributions to contemporary culture in Siena by looking at the emergence of a new lyric tradition and the sonnets they exchanged among themselves and with their male contemporaries. Through the analysis of their poems and various book dedications to them, Eisenbichler reveals the intersection of poetry, politics, and sexuality, as well as the gendered dialogue that characterized Siena's literary environment during the late Renaissance. Eisenbichler also examines other little-known women poets and their relationship to the cultural environment of Siena, underlining the exceptional role of the city of Siena as the most important center of women's writing in the first half of the sixteenth century in Italy, and probably in all of Europe. This innovative contribution to the field of late Renaissance and early modern Italian and women's studies rescues from near oblivion a group of literate women who were celebrated by contemporary scholars but who have been largely ignored today, both because of a dearth of biographical information about them and because of a narrow evaluation of their poetry. Eisenbichler's analysis and reproduction of many of their poems in Italian and modern English translation are an invaluable contribution not only to Italian cultural studies but also to women's studies.

Winner, 2009 Best Book Award, Society for the Study of Early Modern WomenWinner, 2008 PROSE Award for Best Book in Language, Literature, and Linguistics. Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers This is the first comprehensive study of the remarkably rich tradition of women’s writing that flourished in Italy between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Virginia Cox documents this tradition and both explains its character and scope and offers a new hypothesis on the reasons for its emergence and decline. Cox combines fresh scholarship with a revisionist argument that overturns existing historical paradigms for the chronology of early modern Italian women’s writing and questions the historiographical commonplace that the tradition was brought to an end by the Counter Reformation. Using a comparative analysis of women's activities as artists, musicians, composers, and actresses, Cox locates women's writing in its broader contexts and considers how gender reflects and reinvents conventional narratives of literary change.

The ironic tale of a 12-year-old Sicilian girl who decides to show her independence by flouting convention, in this case by wearing trousers and flirting with boys. When she is caught kissing, the parents punish her by sending her to another village to live with an uncle, unaware he molested her when she was younger.