Matilde Serao: International Profile, Reception and Networks ed. by Gabriella Romani, Ursula Fanning, and Katharine Mitchell (review)

Reviewed by: Matilde Serao: International Profile, Reception and Networks ed. by Gabriella Romani, Ursula Fanning, and Katharine Mitchell Sophie Maddison Matilde Serao: International Profile, Reception and Networks. Ed. by Gabriella Romani, Ursula Fanning, and Katharine Mitchell. (Women and Gender in Italy (1500–1900)/Donne e gender in Italia (1500–1900), 4) Paris: Classiques Garnier. 2022. 264 pp. €29. ISBN 978–2–406–12851–9. Despite a steady resurgence of scholarly interest in Matilde Serao (1856–1927), few book-length studies of the Italian author have appeared in English to date. The publication of this edited collection is therefore significant. Introducing the volume, the editors assert that Serao enjoys modern-day renown in several countries; their main argument is that during her lifetime, too, the author's fiction 'had a transnational appeal throughout Europe' (p. 9). The decision to focus on Serao's fiction rather than her journalism is presented on the grounds that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 'her international reputation was mainly based on her fiction translated into various European languages' (p. 8). This point is largely substantiated throughout the volume, though in consequence little attention is paid to Serao's well-known exposé of poverty in nineteenth-century Naples (Il ventre di Napoli (1884; 1906)) or her pioneering role as a female newspaper editor: she was the first Italian woman to launch a newspaper, founding the Neapolitan daily Il Giorno in 1904. The Introduction provides concise yet vital information about the full extent of Serao's work. The volume is structured in alphabetical order, to avoid 'assumptions or suggestions as to Serao's apparent predominance in a given country' (p. 12). It contains nine chapters, five of which are case studies of Serao's translation and reception in European countries: Bulgaria, Finland, Russia, Spain, and Sweden. Each of these chapters ends with a bibliography of Serao's fictional works translated into the language(s) in question during the period under scrutiny. End Page 276 Although the other four chapters also address the translation and reception of Serao's work, their focus is somewhat different. Ulla Åkerström provides insight into the mechanisms of the Nobel Prize for Literature and offers a compelling argument as to why Serao was never awarded the accolade despite being nominated four times (1922, 1923, 1924, and 1925). Åkerström challenges the widespread belief that this was due to political intervention motivated by the anti-war and anti-fascist stance of Serao's novel Mors tua (1926). Ursula Fanning examines how Serao was represented by Anglophone critics during her lifetime, identifying a 'two-pronged othering' based on sex and Southernness in the work of male critics and a 'singular kind of othering' based on Southernness alone in the work of female critics (p. 93). Rossana Melis and Maria Luisa Wandruszka examine a 1912lecture on Serao's work given by the German critic Leo Spitzer. This chapter begins with a more biographical focus than the others and is ambitious in the ground it covers—not least because Spitzer's lecture, as the authors point out, is 'raw and disjointed' (p. 109). Departing from the volume's predominant focus on fiction, Gabriella Romani examines the non-fictional Nel paese di Gesù: ricordi di un viaggio in Palestina (1898). Romani argues that Serao's decision to turn articles written in 1893 into a travelogue was rooted in the 'certainty that her book would find a readership abroad' (p. 168), supporting this contention in ways that connect nicely to the volume's overarching themes. The conference through which the idea for this book came about (part of a project on the reception of women's writing (p. 7)) and the series to which it belongs (Women and Gender in Italy (1500–1900)) indicate the extent to which Serao is still categorized as a 'woman writer'. The issue of gender is dealt with more critically in some chapters than in others. Overall, however, the volume moves the study of Serao's work beyond a gender-oriented approach. Its impressively wide-ranging enquiry into the author's translation and reception makes this a valuable addition to a growing body of scholarship...