Since its foundation, the Italian Virginia Woolf Society has become a point of reference for Italian Woolf scholars, who contacted the Society asking for bibliographical references or for information on translations of Woolf’s works. From these requests the idea of the Italianwoolf database was born. Realised within the research project Virginia Woolf and Italian Readers, financed by the European research and innovation programme Horizon 2020, Italianwoolf (https://www.italianwoolf.com/) is an Open Access searchable Database containing the bibliographical catalogue of all editions of Woolf’s works in Italian translation, as well as a catalogue of all articles, reviews, and essays on Woolf appeared in Italy. Being searchable by title, author, translator and keywords both in Italian and in English, and providing direct access to online articles, Italianwoolf is a tool enabling scholars worldwide to access new critical material and to form an idea on how Woolf was read and received from a national perspective. This chapter will illustrate the methods applied and the processes carried out to build this Database with a user-oriented approach, for instance by designing different paths of research for each category of users. The Italian production on Woolf was then classified according to three different ‘families’ of products: works – including monographs and translations; articles – including newspaper, magazine and academic articles as well as book chapters; and people – including scholars, translators, editors and authors who wrote on Woolf. The aim of the chapter is to show how digital-humanities can help to shed light both on the work of cultural mediation of translators, series editors, taste-makers and gate-keepers; on the economic and social factors influencing publishers’ choices and on the creative dimension of literary translation, this way fostering a better understanding of the steps that her reception has taken to make of Virginia Woolf a cultural icon in Italy.
A Database of Her Own: Digitalising the Reception of Virginia Woolf in Italy
Elisa Bolchi
2025
Abstract
Since its foundation, the Italian Virginia Woolf Society has become a point of reference for Italian Woolf scholars, who contacted the Society asking for bibliographical references or for information on translations of Woolf’s works. From these requests the idea of the Italianwoolf database was born. Realised within the research project Virginia Woolf and Italian Readers, financed by the European research and innovation programme Horizon 2020, Italianwoolf (https://www.italianwoolf.com/) is an Open Access searchable Database containing the bibliographical catalogue of all editions of Woolf’s works in Italian translation, as well as a catalogue of all articles, reviews, and essays on Woolf appeared in Italy. Being searchable by title, author, translator and keywords both in Italian and in English, and providing direct access to online articles, Italianwoolf is a tool enabling scholars worldwide to access new critical material and to form an idea on how Woolf was read and received from a national perspective. This chapter will illustrate the methods applied and the processes carried out to build this Database with a user-oriented approach, for instance by designing different paths of research for each category of users. The Italian production on Woolf was then classified according to three different ‘families’ of products: works – including monographs and translations; articles – including newspaper, magazine and academic articles as well as book chapters; and people – including scholars, translators, editors and authors who wrote on Woolf. The aim of the chapter is to show how digital-humanities can help to shed light both on the work of cultural mediation of translators, series editors, taste-makers and gate-keepers; on the economic and social factors influencing publishers’ choices and on the creative dimension of literary translation, this way fostering a better understanding of the steps that her reception has taken to make of Virginia Woolf a cultural icon in Italy.I documenti in SFERA sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
