Race and Narrative in Italian Women's Writing Since Unification

Race and Narrative in Italian Women's Writing Since Unification
Author: Melissa Coburn
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2013-07-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611476003

Race as Narrative in Italian Women's Writing Since Unification explores racist ideas and critiques of racism in four long narratives by female authors Grazia Deledda, Matilde Serao, Natalia Ginzburg, and Gabriella Ghermandi, who wrote in Italy after national unification. Starting from the premise that race is a political and socio-historical construction, Melissa Coburn makes the argument that race is also a narrative construction. This is true in that many narratives have contributed to the historical construction of the idea of race; it is also true in that the concept of race metaphorically reflects certain formal qualities of narration. Coburn demonstrates that at least four sets of qualities are common among narratives and central to the development of race discourse: intertextuality; the processes of characterization, plot, and tropes; the tension between the projections of individual, group, and universal identities; and the processes of identification and otherness. These four sets of qualities become organizing principles of the four sequential chapters, paralleling a sequential focus on the four different narrative authors. The juxtaposition of these close, contextualized readings demonstrates salient continuities and discontinuities within race discourse over the period examined, revealing subtleties in the historical record overlooked by previous studies.

Migrants shaping Europe, past and present

Migrants shaping Europe, past and present
Author: Helen Solterer
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2022-11-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1526166178

This pioneering volume explores the contribution of migrants to European culture from the early modern era to today. It takes culture as an aesthetic and social activity of making, one practised by migrants on the move and also by those who represent their lives in an act of support. Adopting a multilingual approach, the book interprets the aesthetics and political practices developed by and with migrants in Spain, Italy and France. It juxtaposes early modern and modern work with contemporary, reconceiving migrants as crucial agents of change. Scholars and artists track people on the move within the continent and without, drawing a significant map for the cultural history of migration around Europe.

Contesting Race and Citizenship

Contesting Race and Citizenship
Author: Camilla Hawthorne
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2022-07-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501762303

Contesting Race and Citizenship is an original study of Black politics and varieties of political mobilization in Italy. Although there is extensive research on first-generation immigrants and refugees who traveled from Africa to Italy, there is little scholarship about the experiences of Black people who were born and raised in Italy. Camilla Hawthorne focuses on the ways Italians of African descent have become entangled with processes of redefining the legal, racial, cultural, and economic boundaries of Italy and by extension, of Europe itself. Contesting Race and Citizenship opens discussions of the so-called migrant "crisis" by focusing on a generation of Black people who, although born or raised in Italy, have been thrust into the same racist, xenophobic political climate as the immigrants and refugees who are arriving in Europe from the African continent. Hawthorne traces not only mobilizations for national citizenship but also the more capacious, transnational Black diasporic possibilities that emerge when activists confront the ethical and political limits of citizenship as a means for securing meaningful, lasting racial justice—possibilities that are based on shared critiques of the racial state and shared histories of racial capitalism and colonialism.

Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives

Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives
Author: Marie Orton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2021-10-26
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 168393315X

Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives brings together creative literary works and scholarly articles. Both address the changes and challenges to identity formation in an Italy marked by the migrations, populism, nationalism, and xenophobia, and analyze diversity and the affirmation of belonging.

Annie Chartres Vivanti

Annie Chartres Vivanti
Author: Sharon Wood
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2016-10-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 168393007X

This book explores the work of a writer, Annie Chartres Vivanti (1866–1942), who brought a transnational dimension to the marked provincialism of the Italian novel by addressing issues of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality on personal and international levels, and by creating work that distanced itself from much of the female-penned literature of the day, scorning both decorum and social respectability. Chapters in this book examine Vivanti’s output from multiple perspectives, taking into account her politics and her career as a journalist, writer, and singer, as well as her literary work.

Gender, Narrative, and Dissonance in the Modern Italian Novel

Gender, Narrative, and Dissonance in the Modern Italian Novel
Author: Silvia Valisa
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2014-11-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442619767

Combining close textual readings with a broad theoretical perspective, Gender, Narrative, and Dissonance in the Modern Italian Novel is a study of the ways in which gender shapes the principal characters and narratives of seven important Italian novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1827) to Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli (1982). Silvia Valisa’s innovative approach focuses on the tensions between the characters and the gender ideologies that surround them, and the ways in which this dissonance exposes the ideological and epistemological structures of the modern novel. A provocative account of the intersection between gender, narrative, and epistemology that draws on the work of Georg Lukács, Barbara Spackman, and Teresa de Lauretis, this volume offers an intriguing new approach to investigating the nature of fiction.

The Unpopular Realism of Vincenzo Padula

The Unpopular Realism of Vincenzo Padula
Author: Joseph Francese
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2021-10-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1683933338

The Unpopular Realism of Vincenzo Padula provides a microhistory of life in a Southern Italian province in the decade following Unificationand of Vincenzo Padula, who wrote single-handedly from March 1864 to July 1865 — a period when pro-Bourbon loyalists were attempting to exploit the discontent of the Region’s poor masses by fomenting brigantry and reverse the Unification — Il Bruzio, a pro-Government periodical published in Cosenza. The pro-government reformist Padula pointed out not only the successes but also the shortcomings and failures of the Savoy regime, so as to consolidate their rule. He gave particular attention to the problems of daily life through the correspondence of a literary creation, Mariuzza Sbrìffiti. The difficult integration of the South, in Padula’s view, was often exacerbated by the unwillingness of the “piemontesi” to learn the social, political, and economic realities of the South. Padula enables us to view from multiple angles both macroscopic issues, such as the relationship between the Church and the New Italy, and the dire state of the infrastructure and economy, and microscopic ones, such as the peasantry’s misplaced hopes in Garibaldi, clerical obscurantism, popular beliefs and culture, contradictions in the structure of the new liberal regime, and the status and role of women in such a society. He views his subjects from a unique perspective, one is defined by its empathy for and identification with the marginalized “persons of Calabria.”

Claiming a Tradition

Claiming a Tradition
Author: Mary Jo Bona
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 1999
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780809322589

Mary Jo Bona reconstructs the literary history and examines the narrative techniques of eight Italian American women's novels from 1940 to the present. Largely neglected until recently, these women's family narratives compel a reconsideration of what it means to be a woman and an ethnic in America. Bona discusses the novels in pairs according to their focus on Italian American life. She first examines the traditions of italianitá (a flavor of things Italian) that inform and enhance works of fiction. The novelists in that tradition were Mari Tomasi (Like Lesser Gods, 1949) and Marion Benasutti (No Steady Job for Papa, 1966). Bona then turns to later novels that highlight the Italian American belief in the family's honor and reputation. Conflicts between generations, specifically between autocratic fathers and their children, are central to Octavia Waldo's 1961 A Cup of the Sun and Josephine Gattuso Hendin's 1988 The Right Thing to Do. Even when writers choose to steer away from the familial focus, Bona notes, their developmental narratives trace the reintegration of characters suffering from a crisis of cultural identity. Relating the characters' struggles to their relationship to the family, Bona examines Diana Cavallo's 1961 A Bridge of Leaves and Dorothy Bryant's 1978 Miss Giardino. Bona then discusses two innovative novels—Helen Barolini's 1979 Umbertina and Tina De Rosa's 1980 Paper Fish—both of which feature a granddaughter who invokes her grandmother, a godparent figure. Through Barolini's feminist and De Rosa's modernist perspectives, both novels present a young girl developing artistically. Closing with a discussion of the contemporary terrain Italian American women traverse, Bona examines such topics as sexual identity when it meets cultural identity and the inclusion of italianitá when Italian American identity is not central to the story. Italian American women writers, she concludes, continue in the 1980s and 1990s to focus on the interplay between cultural identity and women's development.

Portrait of the Artist and His Mother in Twentieth-Century Italian Culture

Portrait of the Artist and His Mother in Twentieth-Century Italian Culture
Author: Daniela Bini
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2020-12-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9781683932574

Portrait of the Artist and His Mother in Twentieth-Century Italian Culture examines how the strong mother-son relationship not only affected, but actually shaped the work of Italian artists as different as Pirandello, Carlo Levi, Buzzati, Pasolini, Fellini, concluding on with a look at mammismo/vitellonismo in some Italian film comedies.