This Pivot looks at why the ‘woman reader’ became a favoured subject in the literature and iconography of nineteenth-century Europe. It shows how the concept of the ‘woman who reads’ was at the heart of a debate among important post-unification Italian authors such as Fogazzaro, De Roberto, Verga, Serao, D'Annunzio, and Svevo. Dwelling on descriptions of reading and writing, and highlighting the identification of the reader in fiction, these writers pondered the morality or ‘immorality’ of the novel, asking questions about the status and function of literature and the readers’ role as agents in the cultural circuit. Santovetti shows how a shift in the conception of art underscored such questions: from the Romantics’ foregrounding of art’s pedagogic and moralistic function to l'art pour l'art’s championing of the autonomy of the artistic sphere. She argues that there was significant experimentation here and in the form and the language of the realist novel—experimentation that prefigured the meta-reflection of the modernist novel.

Olivia Santovetti is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research focuses on Italian and comparative literature, the theory of the novel, metafiction, and representations of reading from the nineteenth century to the digital age, with particular attention to the works of Elena Ferrante. Her earlier work explored the narrative workings of digression in the Italian novel and the reception of Laurence Sterne in Italy.