Italian Contributions

The woman is the protagonist of four important volumes published last year, whether in her interaction with clothing (specifically, accessories), in her relationship with art works, as private/public persona, or—as is the case with the different portraits of the Lady created by Henry James—in the cultural representation of femininity. Several scholars contributed to the three collections of essays: Abito e identità: Ricerche di storia letteraria e culturale (Palermo: Ila Palma), the fourth in a successful series edited by Cristina Giorcelli focusing on the literary and cultural history of fashion; Before Peggy Guggenheim: American Women Art Collectors, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (Venice: Marsilio), resulting from a conference celebrating the centennial anniversary of the famous American woman collector's birth; and a special issue of Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica, presented by Giorcelli and Giuseppe Monsagrati, "Margaret Fuller tra Europa e Stati Uniti d'America," containing the papers of the international symposium commemorating the 150th anniversary of Fuller's death (Rome: Carocci). Donatella Izzo is the single author of Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James (Nebraska), a prominent contribution to James studies. Three volumes deal with the critical and theoretical issues that emerged in the last century. Among them, The Idea and The Thing in Modernist American Poetry, ed. Giorcelli (Palermo: Ila Palma), concerns the experimental poetic movement that, thanks to the Objectivist poets who wished "to replace 'ideas' with 'things,' concepts with objects, abstractions with facts, principles with action," promoted "the peculiar, dense, concreteness of the word." A second collection of essays, Presenza di T. S. Eliot, ed. Agostino Lombardo (Rome: Bulzoni), revisits the intellectual production and artistic achievement of a 20th-century poet who has been the frequent object of attack. A special issue of Acoma contains the papers presented at the 2000 convention on "Pubblico e privato nella cultura statunitense del Novecento," whose emphasis rests on the private emotional, existential, and intellectual dimension of the writer and/or the function of the works produced within the public context. Critical approaches in all volumes are firmly grounded in recent research in gender, ethnic, and cultural studies.

a. General Works, Literature

As Sergio Perosa observes in his concluding remarks to the 1999 conference "Before Peggy Guggenheim," the collections of those American women art collectors, as much as the contributions offered by the scholars who have studied them, are a "monument to far-sightedness, the good use of money, generosity, chance, a sense of the future, and sheer good luck." If on the one hand, as Perosa observes, Henry James testifies to the infinite potential implications of collecting art, Guggenheim on the other fulfilled James's wish by achieving the splendid collection she left in Venice. Among the essays, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi's "Introduction: Collectors, Collecting, and American Literature" (Before Peggy Guggenheim, pp. 15–29), Gregory Dowling's "'Paying Court': The Chivalrous Language of Art and Money in the Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner" (pp. 85–97), and Alide Cagidemetrio's "A New Wo-man in the Art Place: Pictures from the Lives of the Berensons" (pp. 65–83) all take as their starting point, and then concentrate on, Stewart Gardner as a model for John Singer Sargent's 1888 portrait, the recipient of a 1907 letter by Berenson intended to have her buy three important Italian masters' paintings, and, quite unexpectedly, a selfish, whimsical, and pathetic old lady on her way to the other world, as portrayed by Mary Berenson in 1920. Having brilliantly elected the portrait set against a Venetian pattern as an appropriate icon for the conference, Zorzi goes on to illustrate the function of art collecting in American literature in order to evaluate critically its symbolic, cultural, and prophetic impact on American society. Washington Irving's Western prairies as seen through Salvator Rosa's paintings, Edgar Allan Poe's and Nathaniel Hawthorne's portraits, and even Herman Melville's description of the painting in the Spouter Inn are examples of the presence of art in American literature before the golden age of collecting; later authors such as James and...