Luisa Villa

Luisa Villa is Professor of English Literature at the University of Genova. Her research work has concentrated mainly on Victorian and early-modernist literature, with a focus on the construction of modern subjectivities, and an interest in the intesections between literature and other discursive practices (such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, economics, history). Her early work in the 1980s focussed mainly on Henry James and other authors connected with aestheticism and decadence (Wilde, Symons, Pater, Machen), whom she read through the lens of philosophically-oriented critique of ideology (drawing on Simmel, Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin). Later on she tackled questions related to female identity in the works of George Eliot and Olive Schreiner, which she investigated mainly through feminist appropriations of psychoanalysis. More recently she has been studying fin-de-siècle variants of masculinity -- working on Gissing, Conrad, Stevenson, Kipling, and on the representation of violence and colonial warfare. At present, her main research work is focussed on the young Disraeli.
She has published books in Italian on Henry James (1989), George Eliot (1994), ressentiment in late nineteenth-century fiction (1997), and more recently on the representation of the British military campaigns in the Sudan (“For Honour, not Honours”, 2009). Some of her articles – on James and Ruskin, Gissing, the fin de siècle Schopenhauerian vogue, Stevenson, Kipling, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt – have been included in collections published by Palgrave, Rodopi, Peter Lang, Equilibris, and University of Wisconsin Press, and in the Journal of Victorian Culture. She edited Modernism and the Mediterranean: Literature and Politics 1900-1937 (2014), and co-edited with Marco Pustianaz, Maschilità decadenti. La lunga fin de siècle (2004), Alessandro Vescovi and Paul Vita The Victorians and Italy: Literature, Travel, Politics and Art (2009), and with Massimo Bacigalupo, The Politics and Poetics of Displacement: Modernism off the Beaten Track (2011). Her current research project concerns Benjamin Disraeli’s early fiction.