ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book develops the notion of a multipolar, gendered, mass, critical, and affective female spectatorship-in-the-making at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century in Italy and beyond. It provides an overview of how Italian opera compared with opera in the rest of Europe, exploring the changing role of Italian theatres and politeama which hosted the silent screen from 1897 onwards until after World War I. The book also examines the reflections on theatre and cinema-going by women writers and readers in women’s magazines and newspaper columns. It looks beyond Italy to uncover a selection of affective and discerning responses among women spectators from Naples, to Paris, to Boston that signal a Mediterranean, southern European “exportable” spectatorship-in-the-making; one whose origins were nevertheless rooted in the specificity of the relationship between Italy’s female performers and their spectators.
