New New Woman

Continuing a little run of announcements of new forthcoming Legenda titles: A 'New' Woman in Verga and Pirandello: From Page to Stage by Enza De Francisci will be volume 40 in our Italian Perspectives series. With this book, Enza draws a thread all the way from Norway to Sicily. Ibsen's theatre of the New Woman drew responses from another giant of the turn-of-the-century stage, Luigi Pirandello, and from the Italian realist Giovanni Verga. Many great cultural movements get going long before anyone gives them a name that sticks, and the actual term 'New Woman' doesn't seem to arrive until the mid-1890s. Still, A Doll's House premiered in 1879, and the plays of Verga and Pirandello — building on earlier short stories, but now adapted for the stage in the age of Ibsen — certainly fit into the early stages of this wider picture.

Enza's book appears with us at the end of the year. For the cover, we'd like to thank the contemporary artist Daniele Corso. You can see more of his work at the Instagram feed pop_art_dangc.