Description: This critical volume offers an overview and close analysis of Italian women's autobiographical writings from the twentieth century, engaging with issues of form and content and identifying recurring paradigms. It will be of interest to students of Italian literature and cultur...
Review Quotes:
"Marking out some unique turf in the burgeoning literature on 20th-century Italian women's autobiographical writing, Fanning focuses on female subjectivity in both fiction and overt self-writing by "real women"--that is, specific women authors. Bridging the gap between fictive and overtly nonfictional self-writing, the author borrows Lilian Furst's concept of a "porous interface" between the two: each subject is fully embodied in her unique biographical conditions and specific political and social culture, and embedded within the literary scene in her unique career and preoccupations, but all are perceived as sharing a common struggle over the course of a revolutionary century--i.e., the struggle to use writing as a means of self-making. Thus the first movement in this rather symphonic assembly of voices becomes a kind of biographical tryout, in which Fanning establishes for each considered author (Sibilla Aleramo, Grazia Deledda, Anna Banti, Natalia Ginzburg, Francesca Sanvitale, Fabrizia Ramondino, to name just a few) a discrete "presence" across genres on dominant themes (e.g., father, mother, marriage, motherhood) before joining her to other common themes and forms and allowing her to reemerge whole again, shaded by her unique, subjective, embodied difference as a writer. Italian quotations are translated parenthetically, a welcome practice that allows one to appreciate the grace and precision of Fanning's English.
Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." --Choice Reviews "This precious book by Ursula Fanning embarks on a courageous journey [of] reconnaissance and discoveries among the folds of feminine autobiographical writing [in] Twentieth century Italy. . . . Very useful as a handbook. . . this book by Ursula Fanning constitutes a point [of] essential reference in gender studies and research on autobiographical form in the twentieth century. [translated from original Italian]" --OBLIO "Throughout this work, Fanning displays a remarkable ability to discuss a variety of autobiographical works in light of the ever-increasing body of scholarship devoted to Italian women writers in the twentieth century. . . . Ursula Fanning's well-researched volume provides a thorough overview of the ways in which women writers have explored autobiographical modes of expression throughout the twentieth century, and as such it will prove useful to both students and scholars." --gender/sexuality/italy