Maggie Gunsberg examines popular genre cinema in Italy during the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on melodrama, commedia all'italiana, peplum, horror and the spaghetti western. These genres are explored from a gender standpoint which takes into account the historical and socio-economic context of cinematic production and consumption. An interdisciplinary feminist approach informed by current film theory and other perspectives (psychoanalytic, materialist, deconstructive), leads to the analysis of genre-specific representations of femininity and masculinity as constructed by the formal properties of...

An exploration of the portrayal of gender on the Italian stage from the Renaissance to the present, in a social and theoretical context.

This contemporary feminist reading of an important modern European writer and dramatist illustrates a variety of methods that could be applied to other authors' texts as well. Gunsberg examines the representation of gender relations in Pirandello's writing and reassesses his status as an avant garde author, arguing that while he can certainly be described as avant garde on the level of dramatic form, he cannot be said to innovate at the more covert level of gender relations.

Maggie GUnsberg explores gender portrayal on the Italian stage, and its shifting relationship with other social categories of class, age and the family from the Renaissance to the present day. She examines both the formal properties of drama and the conventions of drama in performance. An interdisciplinary approach and feminist perspective inform her critique of work by Machiavelli, Ariosto, Goldoni, D'Annunzio and Pirandello. She concludes by assessing the impact of Franca Rame on contemporary Italian theater.