Presentation of the book by Maria Serena Sapegno
The author will be in conversation with Abigail Brundin
The history of literature is full of authors that have investigated the relationship between fathers and daughters, often giving voice to the daughters’ point of view, as Sophocles did with Antigone, Shakespeare with Cordelia, or Philip Roth with Merry in American Pastoral.
However, the moment arrived when the fathers’ daughters claimed their own voice. As a matter of fact, as Virginia Wolf shows in A room of one’s own, the modernity brought by the Enlightenment represented a breakthrough and impelled middle-class women to write in first person, Jane Austen to name but one.
In this book, Maria Serena Sapegno tells the story of a natural but also symbolic relationship, dense of archaic ambiguities, addressing those writers that centered their own human and existential investigation on this relationship, from Jane Austen to George Eliot, from Virginia Woolf to the women of the 70s.
Event in English
Maria Serena Sapegno spent several years of research in England, at the Warburg, at the British Library, at Oxford. She has been involved in Renaissance utopic-political thought and historiography (Machiavelli, Guicciardini, More, Campanella), as well as problems of the novel in Italy between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and questions of national tradition and nation building in literary historiography. She has been working on the writing of contemporary women but also of Renaissance poets with particular attention to Vittoria Colonna. Women’s and Gender Studies have always been an area of strong commitment: she has been organizing since 2000 a Seminar in feminist studies centred on the exchange and cooperation between different generations of women, inviting contributions from different Universities and Institutions in Italy and in Europe (Laboratorio di Studi Femministi “Sguardi sulle differenze”).
Abigail Brundin specializes in the literature and culture of Renaissance and Early Modern Italy. She has written on many aspects of the period, from female convents to the Grand Tour, and is above all known for her work on the poet Vittoria Colonna, as the translator of the Sonnets for Michelangelo (2005) and author of Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (2008). Her most recent book, The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy, was published in 2018. She has taught at the University of Cambridge since 2002, is a fellow of St Catharine’s College and is currently chair of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages.