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In By the Breath of Their Mouths, Mary Jo Bona examines the oral uses of language and the liberating power of speech in Italian American writing, as well as its influences on generations of assimilated Italian American writers. Probing and wide-ranging, Bona's analysis reveals the lasting importance of storytelling and folk narrative, their impact on ethnic, working-class, and women's literatures, and their importance in shaping multiethnic literature. Drawing on a wide range of material from several genres, including oral biographies, fiction, film, poetry, and memoir, and grounded in recent theories of narrative and autobiography, postcolonial theory, and critical multiculturalism, By the Breath of Their Mouths is must reading for students in Italian American studies in particular and ethnic studies and multiethnic literature more generally.
I Stop Waiting For You by Mary Jo Bona is an immensely moving meditation on grief for the twin bother who dies from AIDS; the ghosts of her other dead and lost populate this book as well. Those losses are balanced out by her poems that explore her Italian American heritage and her love poems. This book is a way of mourning her lost brother, a way of keeping him alive in her memory. It is also a celebration of the woman she loves who makes her own life worth living. What an accomplished, beautiful, amazing book I read it all in one sitting and look forward to reading it again and again. -Maria Mazziott ii Gillan American Book Award for All That Lies Between Us
Examining the family saga as an instrument of literary analysis of writing by Italian American women, this book argues that the genre represents a key strategy for Italian American female writers as a form which distinctly allows them to establish cultural, gender and literary traditions. Spaces are inherently marked by the ideology of the societies that create and practice them, and this volume engages with spaces of cultural and gendered identity, particularly those of the ‘mean streets’ in Italian American fiction, which provide a method of critically analyzing the configurations and representations of identity associated with the Italian American community. Key authors examined include Julia Savarese, Marion Benasutti, Tina De Rosa, Helen Barolini, Melania Mazzucco and Laurie Fabiano. This book is suitable for students and scholars in Literature, Italian Studies, Cultural Studies and Gender Studies.
This volume examines the significance of place in contemporary Italian American literature from an ecocritical perspective. It fills a gap in the theoretical discourse on Italian American culture, whose concerns about environmental justice have been mostly overlooked. From mid-twentieth-century poets such as John Ciardi and Diane di Prima to late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction writers such as Carole Maso and Salvatore Scibona, the study combines Italian American literary criticism with the spatial turn that, over the last decades, has asserted the interpretive significance of place and the environment in literary texts. Questioning the prejudice that sees Italian American cultur...
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The editors' goal in this book is to give a critical overview of where Italian/American literary and cultural studies are today. To this end, Beyond the Margin includes three types of essays: the characteristics of Italian/American literature and culture in a general sense; specific writers; and film.
Since 1987, writer and critic Fred Gardaphé has regularly reviewed Italian/North American literature in Fra Noi, an Italian/American monthly newspaper based in Chicago. This volume features the best of 'Parole Scritte', his monthly columns. Introduced by an essay from which the collection gets its title, Dagoes Read is the first publication of its kind in the history of Italian/North American literature. It serves as a fine introduction to this literary movement as well as a survey of recent publications by Italian/North Americans. Works reviewed include those by Tony Ardiaone, Dorothy Bryant, Pietro di Donato, John Fante, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Frank Lentricchia, Jay Parini, Diane Raptosh, Gay Talese, Sal LaPuma, and many others.
Italian Americans, the fifth-largest ethnic group in the United States, make up a large segment of the population. It is only recently that the daughters and granddaughters of Italian immigrants have begun to write fiction and poetry about their experiences as Italian/American women. Revisionary Identities focuses on the writings of these women and argues that their works reveal a new identity that is composed of both Italian and American elements but which is neither completely Italian nor totally American. For these writers the categories of race, class, gender, and religion blur causing conflicts, which they try to resolve by imagining an all-powerful immigrant grandmother with whom they form a bond.
Representing the best Italian-American contributions to American literature, this anthology of fiction, poetry, journalistic writings, and essays ranges from the 1800s to the present day.