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Italy and American Female Imagination

By Debra Bernardi

Italy and American Female Imagination Contemporary literature

Italy and American Female Imagination

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Description
Italy and American Female Imagination is the first study to trace the significance of Italy-both the physical place and imagined idea-to the identities of middle-class US women from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Debra Bernardi takes a transnational and feminist approach to texts by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary McCarthy, Andrea Lee, Elizabeth Gilbert, Jhumpa Lahiri, and others, as well as to film, television, magazine articles, and interviews with expats, all to illuminate not only Italy's influence on American identity but also how gender, race, and class inflect that influence. Encounters with Italy, Bernardi shows, have profoundly shifted American women's ways of thinking about sex and romance, families and homes, and rules and regulations. While women of color do not experience Italy as an entirely liberatory space, and attitudes toward Italy have shifted over time, the women writers discussed here consistently find expanded possibilities for female selfhood on Italian soil. Bridging feminist literary studies, cultural studies, and history, Italy and American Female Imagination captures and complicates Italy's allure and casts new light on the process of transnational identity formation.
Product details
Number of Pages:
222
Release Date:
2025-11-17
Publication Date:
2025-11-17
Publisher:
The Ohio State University Press
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0814216013
ISBN13:
9780814216019
Weight:
518 g
Height:
157 cm
Width:
235 cm
Thickness:
18 cm
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