Against the canon. For a plural vision of italian literature

Anyone who has attended school has come across, more or less consciously, the canon of national literature: through school textbooks, generations of female and male students have become acquainted with the authors considered fundamental to the culture of our country. And yet, looking more closely at the composition of the Italian canon, an issue emerges that is the subject of debate: the scarce presence of women writers.

Fortunately, however, the canon is not an immutable entity: by its very nature, it can be transformed over time, welcoming works and voices that, for historical, cultural or social reasons, have been overlooked. From this observation, a clear question emerges: will there be room for women in the Italian canon in the future? We ask Johnny Bertolio, university professor of Italian Literature and author, among other works, of Controcanone. La letteratura delle donne dalle origini a oggi (Against the Canon. Women’s Literature from Its Origins to Today, Loescher, 2022) and “L’ha scritto lei, ma”… Perché a scuola non si studiano le autrici (“She wrote it, but…” Why Women Authors Are Not Studied at School, Tlon, 2026).

First of all, Bertolio speaks of Controcanone to represent a position “against the canon,” “that apparently unassailable device that still today influences the definition of disciplinary content at school, and not only there.” It is necessary to change the approach, Bertolio continues: “we need to build plural imaginaries, to train female and male students in a mental exercise based on the multiplication of points of view.” The proposal is not to create an entirely female parallel canon, but rather to recognize that women authors, even in the harshest contexts, have never worked in isolation; “they have engaged in dialogue with or entered into conflict with the traditions and tastes of the time,” and if the world considered them different and inferior, they used their difference to translate it into “creative power.”

To those, therefore, who are not willing to give up the canon, because “that’s how it has always been done,” because no woman has reached Dante’s level, or because there is little time at school, Bertolio replies that “in other countries they have given up the history of literature all in bits and pieces, a kilo of Boccaccio, an ounce of Tasso, a gram of Alfieri, preferring to proceed by broad themes and complete readings. Teachers have been able to balance time and content, highlighting the relationships between male and female authors in order to stir up the murky waters of the monologue-like and monochromatic canon.”

Science speaks clearly: studying literature for years without ever encountering a woman writer discourages girls from pursuing certain university careers and legitimizes boys in considering women inferior to them; after all, if they have never written anything, it is probably because they have always kept quiet, right? If we want to rediscover the pride of the words of our female ancestors, Bertolio continues, we must reclaim “the many voices, of women and men, who rebelled and who, at the cost of their lives, fought to express themselves and to be published.” This is neither a matter of justice towards the past nor of investment in the future: “it is an act of historical truth, since literature has always been much more welcoming and colorful than the national monuments convey to us. Those women authors who still lack statues and streets named after them were published through the same publishing channels as male authors.”

And if you did not know where to begin, Bertolio concludes, it would be better “to focus not on a single exception, but on the many Renaissance women authors, from Vittoria Colonna to Veronica Gambara, from Gaspara Stampa to Veronica Franco, from Chiara Matraini to Moderata Fonte. A literary flowering that does not wither during the Counter-Reformation, but continues all the way to the Accademia dell’Arcadia, with more than 450 female members, and flows into the nineteenth century, creating important genealogies. A long river, wrongly buried, never interrupted, never! If there is something Italians should be proud of, it is precisely this plurality of perspectives that has no equal, in those same centuries, elsewhere in Europe.”