Download or read book Umbertina written by Helen Barolini and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 1999 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Umbertina is leaving her small Calabrian village in Italy for a new life in the United States. As the years go by and Umbertina lives an Americanized life, her granddaughter, Marguerite, and her great-granddaughter, Tina, find themselves searching for deeper meaning in their lives. Their quest takes them back to Italy for a chance to explore their heritage.
Download or read book The Dream Book written by Helen Barolini and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2000-12-01 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on rare sources and archival material, Helen Barolini has here collected 56 works by Italian American women writers. The volume features: prose, poetry, one play and a large section of fiction.
Download or read book The White Other in American Intermarriage Stories 1945 2008 written by L. Cardon and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-12-23 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fictional depictions of intermarriage can illuminate perceptions of both 'ethnicity' and 'whiteness' at any given historical moment. Popular examples such as Lucy and Ricky in I Love Lucy (1951-1957), Joanna and John in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), Toula and Ian in My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) helped raise questions about national identity: does 'American' mean 'white' or a blending of ethnicities? Building on previous studies by scholars of intermarriage and identity, this study is an ambitious endeavor to discern the ways in which literature and films from the 1960s through 2000s rework nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intermarriage tropes. Unlike earlier stories, these narratives position the white partner as the 'other' and serve as useful frameworks for assessing ethnic and American identity. Lauren S. Cardon sheds new light on ethno-racial solidarity and the assimilation of different ethnicities into American dominant culture.
Download or read book Claiming a Tradition written by Mary Jo Bona and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book From the Margin written by Anthony Julian Tamburri and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology, hailed as a significant contribution to American ethnic studies, features the short stories, poems, and plays of more than thirty Italian American artists. Drawing on their individual and collective backgrounds and experience, these writers convey another vision of American fife. A section of critical essays by established scholars in the field, with topics ranging from specific works and authors to broad literary movements and film studies, analyzes the Italian American phenomenon and the role of ethnicity in literature. The extensive bibliography treats creative works, critical essays, and films dealing with the Italian American experience and promises to be an invaluable research tool.
Download or read book Writing With An Accent written by Edvige Giunta and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary Cappello, Louise DeSalvo, Sandra M. Gilbert, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Carole Maso, Agnes Rossi. These are some of the best-known Italian American writers today. They are part of a literary tradition with mid-twentieth century roots that began to develop, in earnest, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During those decades, a number of Italian American women, such as Helen Barolini, began to publish books that depicted their perspectives on life through the critical lenses of gender, class, and ethnicity. At the end of the twentieth century, this literature finally blossomed into a fully fledged cultural movement that also took into account issues of sexuality, age, illness, and familial and societal abuse. Writing with an Accent takes a look at this vibrant literary movement by discussing those first writers of the 1970s and 1980s as well as later authors. At the center of Edvige Giunta s Writing with an Accent is the literal notion of accent, the marker of linguistic and cultural difference that separates and identifies recent immigrants to the United States. In this study, an accent symbolically embodies the differences and creative strategies through which contemporary Italian American women writers engage Italian American culture in works of fiction, poetry, and memoir. Giunta also looks at the links between the literature and art, music, film, and video produced by contemporary Italian American women. The literature of the Italian American women in Writing with an Accent is shaped by the complicated connections these authors maintain with their cultural origins, but also, and perhaps more importantly, by their feminist consciousness and politicized sense of ethnic identity. Writing with an Accent celebrates and explores a group of authors who characteristically mix the joy and pain of Italian American life to paint a multifaceted picture of Italian American women and their complex place in U.S. culture.
Download or read book A Semiotic of Ethnicity written by Anthony Julian Tamburri and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1998-09-11 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reexamines the notion of the "hyphenate writer," and offers a specific reading strategy that we may consider the Italian/American writer in the age of semiotics, poststructuralism, and the like.
Download or read book Between Anthropology and Literature written by Rose De Angelis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-08-27 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection addresses the ways in which the language of social science fuses with that of the literary imagination. The essays fit excellently with the current interest in interdisciplinary studies.
Download or read book Beyond Memory written by Dennis Barone and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncovers an overlooked aspect of the Italian American experience. In Beyond Memory, Dennis Barone uncovers the richness and diversity of the Italian Protestant experience and places it in the context of migration and political and social life in both Italy and the United States. Italian Protestants have received scant attention in the fields of Italian American studies, religious studies, and immigration studies, and through literary sources, church records, manuscript sources, and secondary sources in various fields, Barone introduces such forgotten voices as the Baptist Antonio Mangano, the Methodist Antonio Arrighi, and his great-grandfather Alfredo Barone, a Baptist minister to congregations in Italy and Massachusetts. Examining the complex histories of these and other Italian Protestants, Barone argues that Protestantism ultimately served as a means to negotiate between Old World and New World ways, even as it resulted in the double alienation of rejection by Roman Catholic immigrants and condescension by Anglo-Protestants. Though the book focuses on the years of high immigration (18901920), it also looks at precursors to post-reunification Protestants as well as Protestants in Italy today, now that the nation has become a country of in-migration.
Download or read book Return Narratives written by Theodora D. Patrona and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a comparative study of six Italian American and Greek American literary works written in the three last decades of the 20th century and examined in pairs. Based on the common theme of the authors' return, either metaphorical or literal to the country of origin and its culture, Return Narratives explores the common motifs of mythology, ritual, and storytelling where the third generation writers resort to in their quest for self-definition. With a common historical and cultural background in the old neighboring countries, Greece and Italy, and a similar reception in the new world facilitating a comparative approach, the ethnic writers of the two literatures, clearly envisage ethnic space as a site of resilience and empowerment.
Download or read book The Italian American Heritage written by Pellegrino A D'Acierno and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-12 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1999. The many available scholarly works on Italian-Americans are perhaps of little practical help to the undergraduate or high school student who needs background information when reading contemporary fiction with Italian characters, watching films that require a familiarity with Italian Americans, or looking at works of art that can be fully appreciated only if one understands Italian culture. This basic reference work for non-specialists and students offers quick insights and essential, easy-to-grasp information on Italian-American contributions to American art, music, literature, motion pictures and cultural life. This rich legacy is examined in a collection of original essays that include portrayals of Italian characters in the films of Francis Coppola, Italian American poetry, the art of Frank Stella, the music of Frank Zappa, a survey of Italian folk customs and an analysis of the evolution of Italian-American biography. Comprising 22 lengthy essays written specifically for this volume, the book identifies what is uniquely Italian in American life and examines how Italian customs, traditions, social mores and cultural antecedents have wrought their influence on the American character. Filled with insights, observations and ethnic facts and fictions, this volume should prove to be a valuable source of information for scholars, researchers and students interested in pinpointing and examining the cultural, intellectual and social influence of Italian immigrants and their successors.
Download or read book Rites of Passage Rational Irrational Natural Supernatural Local Global written by Associazione italiana di anglistica. Congresso and published by Rubbettino Editore. This book was released on 2003 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Italian America written by Margherita Ganeri and published by Mimesis. This book was released on 2015-09-17T00:00:00+02:00 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers to the reader a tool to address the still largely uncharted territory of contemporary literature of migration. In addition to presenting and commenting on the production of the prolific writer Helen Barolini, the author Margherita Ganeri has a further ambition: to investigate the question that runs through the debate on the relationship between literary writing and socio-cultural groups, namely the possibility to define literature, and in particular Italian American literature, on the basis of ethnicity. The book includes a preface by Melania G. Mazzucco and an exclusive excerpt of Helen Barolini’s forthcoming Visits.
Download or read book Italian Signs American Streets written by Fred L. Gardaphé and published by New Americanists. This book was released on 1996 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first major critical reading of Italian American narrative literature in two decades, Fred L. Gardaphé presents an interpretive overview of Italian American literary history. Examining works from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, he develops a new perspective--variously historical, philosophical, and cultural--by which American writers of Italian descent can be read, increasing the discursive power of an ethnic literature that has received too little serious critical attention. Gardaphé draws on Vico's concept of history, as well as the work of Gramsci, to establish a culture-specific approach to reading Italian American literature. He begins his historical reading with narratives informed by oral traditions, primarily autobiography and autobiographical fiction written by immigrants. From these earliest social-realist narratives, Gardaphé traces the evolution of this literature through tales of "the godfather" and the mafia; the "reinvention of ethnicity" in works by Helen Barolini, Tina DeRosa, and Carole Maso; the move beyond ethnicity in fiction by Don DeLillo and Gilbert Sorrentino; to the short fiction of Mary Caponegro, which points to a new direction in Italian American writing. The result is both an ethnography of Italian American narrative and a model for reading the signs that mark the "self-fashioning" inherent in literary and cultural production. Italian Signs, American Streets promises to become a landmark in the understanding of literature and culture produced by Italian Americans. It will be of interest not only to students, critics, and scholars of this ethnic experience, but also to those concerned with American literature in general and the place of immigrant and ethnic literatures within that wide framework.
Download or read book Mobile Narratives written by Eleftheria Arapoglou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emphasizing the role of travel and migration in the performance and transformation of identity, this volume addresses representations of travel, mobility, and migration in 19th–21st-century travel writing, literature, and media texts. In so doing, the book analyses the role of the various cultural, ethnic, gender, and national encounters pertinent to narratives of travel and migration in transforming and problematizing the identities of both the travelers and "travelees" enacting in the borderzones between cultures. While the individual essays by scholars from a wide range of countries deal with a variety of case studies from various historical, spatial, and cultural locations, they share a strong central interest in the ways in which the narratives of travel contribute to the imagining of ethnic encounters and how they have acted as sites of transformation and transculturation from the early nineteenth century to the present day. In addition to discussing textual representations of travel and migration, the volume also addresses the ways in which cultural texts themselves travel and are reconstructed in various cultural settings. The analyses are particularly attentive to the issues of globalization and migration, which provide a general frame for interpretation. What distinguishes the volume from existing books is its concern with travel and migration as ways of forging transcultural identities that are able to subvert existing categorizations and binary models of identity formation. In so doing, it pays particular attention to the performance of identity in various spaces of cultural encounter, ranging from North America to the East of Europe, putting particular emphasis on the representation of intercultural and ethnic encounters.
Download or read book American Woman Italian Style written by Carol Bonomo Albright and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With writings that span more than thirty-five years, American Woman, Italian Style is a rich collection of essays that fleshes out the realities of today's Italian American women and explores the myriad ways they continue to add to the American experience. The status of modern Italian-American women in the United States is noteworthy: their quiet and continued growth into respected positions in the professional worlds of law and medicine surpasses the success achieved in that of the general population--so too does their educational attainment and income. Contributions include Donna Gabaccia on the oral-to-written history of cookbooks, Carol Helstosky on the Tradition of Invention, an interview with Sandra Gilbert, Paul Levitt's look at Lucy Mancini as a metaphor for the modern world, William Egelman's survey of women's work patterns, and Edvige Giunta on the importance of a selfconscious understanding of memory. There are explorations of Jewish-Italian intermarriages and interpretations of entrepreneurship in Milwaukee. Readers will find challenges to common assumptions and stereotypes, departures from normal samplings, and springboards to further research. American Woman, Italian Style: Italian Americana's Best Writings on Women offers unique insights into issues of gender and ethnicity and is a voice for the less heard and less seen side of the Italian-American experience from immigrant times to the present. Instead of seeking consensus or ideological orthodoxy, this collection brings together writers with a wide range of backgrounds, outlooks, ideas, and experiences. It is an impressive postmodern collection for interdisciplinary studies: a book and a look about being and becoming an American.
Download or read book Social Pluralism and Literary History written by Francesco Loriggio and published by Guernica Editions. This book was released on 1996 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book starts from the premise that emigration is a crucial concept for the understanding of recent development in criticism and literature. For only when the contribution of non-indigenous ethnicities is taken into account such other key phenomena as globalisation and multiculturalism or -- in some parts of the world -- colonialism or post-colonialism appear in full. The essays in this collection trace the presence of an Italian heritage in the literature of the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and ponder the consequences. While some articles describe the texts or review the history of the literature produced by authors of Italian origin, others address the theoretical implications or situate the discussion about authors and their works within the current critical debate. The result is a volume at once informative and intellectually challenging.
