D'Annunzio's Feminine Archetypes, Nationalist Ideology and Catalan Modernism

Abstract

The fin-de-siècle literary and artistic scene is characterised by the opposition of two well-defined female types that recur in multiple versions and recreations: the angelic woman and the femme fatale. This dichotomy was recovered by romanticism, consolidated by Théophile Gautier in the mid-nineteenth century, and continued to structure the representation of women in the works of artists associated with Decadence and Symbolism. The recurrence of this archetype in different national literatures underlines the extent to which texts circulated across cultural and linguistic boundaries during the European fin-desiècle. It also offers an example of how D’Annunzio’s vision of the feminine, a central element of his poetics which is inscribed in cosmopolitan literary exchange, in turn influenced the reception of his work in other literary contexts.