Italian Women S Autobiographical Writings In The Twentieth Century

This book highlights the centrality of the autobiographical enterprise to Italian women’s writing through the twentieth century—a century that has frequently been referred to as the century of the self. Ursula Fanning addresses the thorny issue of essentialism potentially involved in underlining links between women’s writing and autobiographical modes, and ultimately rejects it in favor of an argument based on the cultural, linguistic, and literary marginalization of women writers within the Italian context. It is concerned with Italian women writers’ various ways of grappling with constructions of subjectivity throughout the century and sets out to explore them. Fanning reads autobiographical writing as subject to many of the same constraints as fiction and, in doing so, draws attention to the significance of the recurring use of the terms “pure” and “impure” in many critical and theoretical discussions of the autobiographical (where “pure” is used to suggest a truthful representation of a life, while “impure” suggests the messy undertaking of mixing lived experience with fiction). Recurring patterns and paradigms are found in the works of the various writers considered (eighteen in all), and these paradigms are analyzed through close readings of their works. These close readings offer insights into approaches to the constructions of subjectivity in the narratives and are informed by feminist theories. The chapters focus on selves in relationship, taking their lead from the patterns unfolding in the writers’ work, hence the subjects are constructed as daughters (with different views of the self in relation to fathers and mothers), within the confines of the romantic relationship (which involves reconsiderations and rewritings of the romance plot), as maternal subjects, and as writers (with an eye on their relationship to the literary canon, as well as to the relationship with readers). This book argues that there is such a thing as gendered subjectivity and that its constructions may be traced through the texts analyzed.

In this important volume, Graziella Parati examines the ways in which Italian women writers articulate their identities through autobiography - a public act that is also the creation of a private life. Considering autobiographical writings by five women writers from the seventeenth century to the present, Parati draws important connections between self-writing and the debate over women's roles, both traditional and transgressive. Parati considers the first prose autobiography written by an Italian woman - Camilla Faa Gonzaga's 1622 memoir - as her beginning point, citing it as a central "pre-text". Parati then examines the autobiographies of Enif Robert, Fausta Cialente, Rita Levi Montalcini, and Luisa Passerini. Through her discussion of these women's writings, she demonstrates the complex negotiations over identity contained within them, negotiations that challenge dichotomies between male and female, maternal and paternal, and private and public. Public History, Private Stories is a compelling exploration of the disparate identities created by these women through the act of writing autobiography.

The essays included in this collection examine issues such as identity and ideology which are at play in the female autobiography practice, along with the problematicity that these trigger in terms of self-representation and traditional formal boundaries. The women writers analyzed here through mainly historical, literary, feminist and psychoanalytic lenses cover a long period in the history of Italy, spanning from the Fascist era to our time. In an attempt to organize and connect these texts which are chronologically far apart, we have divided our contributions into two main parts. The first, “Shapes of Ideology,” includes authors interacting primarily with political ideology in a way that eventually entails the challenge of the official “technologies of gender” (De Lauretis, 1987) and implicitly, a reflection on the gendered identity. In the second part, “Reconsidering ideology, negotiating autobiography,” while the political ideology is not completely excluded, it becomes however something more internalized and relevant to the writers’ quest for identity. Such process bears consequences with respect to the canon of autobiography, as authors experiment with new forms of autobiographical narratives and readers become more and more an integral component of this personal endeavor.

In this study of 19th- and 20th-century French and Italian women's autobiography, the author illustrates how the protagonists' development unfolds through separation from oppressive social and familial structures. Reading the selected life stories as bildungsromane and drawing on an array of both canonical and noncanonical texts in the various autobiographical subgenres, Marrone concludes that the heroines' movements away from oppressive structures are not limited to particular historical periods but are motivated by historical and cultural circumstances. She thoughtfully traces the reasons why a 19th-century protagonist might leave her country, a turn-of-the century heroine might flee her family, and a modern female character might separate from her mother, carefully examining their motivations and their goals. In telling their stories, she concludes, women writers continually challenge existing autobiographical conventions. Marrone finds that postmodern texts prove that the journey toward selfhood may be an ongoing one, one that unfolds through the creation of multiple life stories. The author begins her study with a consideration of the tradition of women's autobiography in French and Italian literature of the 19th- and 20th-centuries. Using several examples from various genres, she brings issues of gender oppression, marital abuse, sexuality, and motherhood to the forefront of the discussion. She continues by analyzing the genres of autobiography and bildungsroman—where they overlap and where they diverge, specifically in women's writing. Turning to specific authors and their works, Marrone moves on to an analysis of the writings of Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, C^D'eleste Mogador, Sibilla Aleramo, Oriana Fallaci, Marie Cardinal, and Annie Ernaux. In examining the works of these writers, the author concludes that women writers continue to attempt to define themselves in their own voices. Marrone finds that postmodern writers participate in innovative experimentation in life writing: hybrid texts, creative auto/biographies, and collective life stories. This clearly written, engaging volume is a pivotal addition to the growing field of literature on autobiography.

In this keen examination of Alfredo de Palchi’s lyrical oeuvre, Giorgio Linguaglossa refers to de Palchi as the missing link in Italian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. From page one of this study, de Palchi’s voice is in constant dialogue with the Italian poets of his time. Linguaglossa gives us a complete picture of the relationship between de Palchi’s asymptomatic creative paradigm and what was taking place around him. While the majority of de Palchi’s life was spent outside of Italy, he continued to engage with Italy in his poetry, in translating Italian poets into English and for close to fifty years as co-editor, with Sonia Raiziss, of Chelsea magazine, a biannual that published a significant number of translations of twentieth-century Italian poets. Through Chelsea magazine de Palchi also became a conduit, bringing Italian poetry to non-Italian-speaking poetry aficionados in the United States. It is especially his own verse, written outside the geocultural boundaries that we know as Italy, which makes this study by Giorgio Linguaglossa all the more important.

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.

Trump and Mussolini: Images, Fake News, and Mass Media as Weapons in the Hands of Two Populists compares two historic men of power and influence, Donald Trump and Benito Mussolini, to analyze the commonality of practices and mannerisms between the two. From rhetoric to body language, to their control over oral and written communication and analogous power strategies, they both possess an unusual talent for new technologies which they utilize to their advantage in unique moments in history. Mussolini lived at the beginning of mass society, Trump at the height of social media, both controversial leaders finding means to utilize these periods of time and the tools surrounding them to further their own agendas and influence society, culture, and authority. The authors examine a plethora of topics and themes such as outward personalities and consuming charisma, means and tools of communication and propaganda, and treatment of women, just to name a few, in order to define the relationship and similarities between these two controversial figures. This book was written before the Capitol Hill assault on January 6th 2021. Mussolini in November 1922 in front of the Parliament said: “I could have made a bivouac of this gloomy gray hall: I could have shut down the Parliament and formed a Government exclusively of Fascists; I could have done so, but I did not wish to do so, at least not at this moment.” Trump, however never said anything like this, but indeed, tried to do it.

Meanwhile, by assimilating the Other into our own modes of representation of reality and imagination, twentieth-century female writers of the fantastic show how alternative identities can be shaped and social constituencies can be challenged."--BOOK JACKET.