Italian Women Writing Across Languages. Translingual Literature and Female Cosmopolitan Identities

Objective

TranslingWOL investigates the literary production of Italian women writers involved in long-lasting mobility abroad who express themselves in languages other than Italian, between the 19th and 21st centuries. From a transnational perspective, using an interdisciplinary set of methodological tools (literary theory and criticism, multilingual studies, women’s studies, sociology of literature, archival research, and digital humanities), it provides the first extensive academic study dedicated to Italian translingual women’s literature, which has been excluded from canonisation processes in both Italian and foreign literary histories, and largely overlooked by scholars, on account of its heterodox nature as compared to the traditional identity between language, literature, and nation. Through close-readings of representative case studies, the project shows the existence of common traits within this panorama – at the textual level (motives and forms) and the contextual level (publication and reception) – and leads to the creation of an interpretative framework useful for the study of such production, an alternative to post- and inter- colonial paradigms to which this and analogous translinguistic phenomena are not merely assimilable. Through a distant reading of the overall panorama, all bio-bibliographical traces of each writer are collected and inserted in a specifically designed database, in order to consolidate the importance of the corpus, geo-map the areas of distribution of texts, and highlight the networks between authors. The goal is not only to rediscover a neglected female literary corpus, but also to provide an innovative gendered and multilingual perspective to interrogate literature. In step with EU policies promoting gender equality and multilingualism, TranslingWOL offers a strategic rethinking of the models we generally use to investigate our cultural heritage, which are based on male as well as monolingual schemes, and proposes a complementary reading.