Reading women's fiction. Liala's novels between uniqueness and standardization

The aim of the paper is to analyse the case of the Italian writer Liala in the light of one specific aspect: the symbolic and crucial role of her work in the changes in Italian women's fiction from the 1950s. Liala's work represents a shift from the traditional narrative, where the role of the author is still crucial, to a writing process directly linked to the social, technological and distribution changes resulting from standardization and serialization in literature

Extending the Middlebrow : Italian fiction in the early twentieth century

The aim of this essay is to determine whether the concept of the middlebrow can also be translated to cultural and historical contexts other than the Anglo-American one in which it first originated. More particularly, we seek to investigate whether the term can usefully be applied to the Italian literary scene of the first part of the twentieth century. After a short introduction of the different historical and critical uses of the term in Britain and the U.S., we turn to Italy of the early twentieth century for a description of the numerous new developments in writing, publishing and marketing literature. Subsequently, we assess the different ways in which these changes have been analysed and conceptualised in Italian literary criticism, so as to point out the lacunae in this scholarship precisely with regard to writing that falls in between the categories of popular and high literature. By means of one more detailed case study, i.e. the work of the once popular and now forgotten writer Pitigrilli, we argue that his novels share many of the characteristics of the literature labelled as middlebrow in an Anglo-American context. The introduction of this term in Italian criticism, we argue, would undoubtedly lead to a more accurate assessment of his work -and that of other writers like him -within Italian literary history