Transcultural Narrative Identities
A Study of Memoir in Contemporary Anglophone Women Authors of the Italian Diaspora
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- Introduction. Theoretical Considerations: Memoir, Gender, Intersectional and Transcultural Perspectives (Pilar Rodríguez Pérez and Eva Pelayo Sañudo)
- PART I. Italian American Women Coming of Age: Memoirs of Childhood and Adolescence
- 1. “And I will Pass On, Too, Stories”: Matrilineal Legacies and Cultural Context in Louise DeSalvo’s Elegiac Memoirs Vertigo (1996) and Crazy in the Kitchen: Family, Feud, and Forgiveness (2004) (Eva Pelayo Sañudo)
- 2. Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Hybrid Forms of the Bildungsroman Through Diane Di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969) and Recollections of My Life as a Woman (2001) (Eva Pelayo Sañudo)
- 3. Space, Emotion, and Gender: Mapping Transcultural Identity in Kym Ragusa’s The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging (2006) (Eva Pelayo Sañudo)
- PART II. Italian Canadian Women Coming to Terms with the Past: Memoirs of Late Life Quests
- 4. The Wellspring of Nostalgia: Memory, Identity and Trauma in Caterina Edwards’ Finding Rosa: A Mother with Alzheimer, a Daughter in Search of the Past (2008) (Eva Pelayo Sañudo)
- 5. A Maternal Memoir: Transmemory, Transgenerational Storytelling and Transculturality in Mary Melfi’s Italy Revisited: Conversations with My Mother (2009) (Pilar Rodríguez Pérez)
- 6. The Road to Now: Recollecting the Ethnic Quest in Penny Petrone’s Breaking the Mould (1995) and Embracing Serafina (2000) (Pilar Rodríguez Pérez)

Acknowledgments
This book has been published with the help of the Basque Government through its financial support to the research group Communication of the University of Deusto (IT1425–22).
It has also been made possible thanks to a research stay undertaken by Eva Pelayo Sañudo at the University of Deusto under the grant “Convocatoria de ayudas para la recualificación del sistema universitario español 2021–2023, Universidad de Cantabria,” financed by the Spanish Ministry of Universities and the European Union (RPF-06).
Eva Pelayo Sañudo is also grateful to the editors of the Journal of English Studies for having granted the permission to reprint the article which formed the basis for chapter 3 of the book: “Space, Emotion, and Gender: Mapping Transcultural Identity in Kym Ragusa’s The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging (2006).”

Preface
This is the first study on the development of Italian ethnic identity in North America, namely the United States and Canada, from a gender perspective and through a focus on the genre of memoir. By considering the interplay between genre, gender and ethnicity, this book argues for a thoughtful reexamination of an emerging form in contemporary autobiographical writing, the memoir, which is particularly apt for narrating the experiences of women and ethnic minorities.
The aim of this book is to offer a new space for the analysis of the female experience in the Italian diaspora through a selected sample of representative writers in contemporary Anglophone literature. In addition, the book proposes the space of memoir writing as a fruitful ground for literary and cultural research and as an important framework that can be applied to enlarge paradigms of identity in our increasingly diverse societies.
Intersectional memoirs—texts written from the perspective of ethnic women—are the focus of this innovative study. It examines the formation of narratives of identity in contemporary writing, particularly looking at the expression of cultural and gender difference through the genre of memoir and within the U.S. and Canadian contexts. The work of migrant/ethnic communities and marginalized voices located at the boundaries of nations, cultures, social classes and genders, is explored through the intertwined use of literary, feminist, racial and cultural memory theory supported with textual analysis.
The broad cross-cultural comparison—including the long history of diversity in the United States and Canada, as well as the political foundations and cultural complexities of Italy—the sustained discussion on the binomial memoir-identity, and engagement with theory from an interdisciplinary approach, produce a significant contribution to broadening the definitions of ethnicity and women’s writing as most of the existing scholarship on literary genres focuses on the representation of either/both female or/and ethnic identity.
The corpus consists of a total of nine memoirs by the Italian American women writers Louise De Salvo, Diane di Prima and Kym Ragusa, and by the Italian Canadian women writers Caterina Edwards, Mary Melfi and Penny Petrone. Using life-writing and cultural memory studies together with ethnic and feminist criticism, this study focuses on the prevailing theme of negotiating transcultural and female identities, analyzing how these women writers contribute to the memoir genre. It offers a varied picture of how they portray family, ethnicity, and memory from their specific positions of writing as women of Italian descent. At the same time, the corpus permits to draw some parallel representations in the portrayal of familial relationships, mostly mothers and daughters, the issue of matrilineal heritage and transcultural identity formation.
The memoirs analyzed include Vertigo, Crazy in the Kitchen: Family, Feud and Forgiveness, Memoirs of a Beatnik, Recollections of my Life as a Woman, The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging, Finding Rosa: A Mother with Alzheimer, a Daughter in Search of the Past, Italy Revisited: Conversations with My Mother, Breaking the Mould and Embracing Serafina: A Memoir. The book is divided into two differentiated parts organized around the themes of memory and the prevailing motif of the identity quest. The first part, “Italian American Women Coming of Age: Memoirs of Childhood and Adolescence,” concentrates on how the authors retrieve the earliest parts of their lives or their development from girls to young women, in the line of the traditional bildungsroman. The second part, “Italian Canadian Women Coming to terms with the Past. Memoirs of Late Life Quests,” deals with the analysis of how the adult self, by deliberately revisiting and/or challenging the past, continues to engage in that quintessential identity quest that is not limited to the formative years given that, as the author Penny Petrone claims, “knowledge of self is a lifetime job.”

Introduction. Theoretical Considerations: Memoir, Gender, Intersectional and Transcultural Perspectives
Pilar Rodríguez Pérez and Eva Pelayo Sañudo
1. Memoir. Definition
An effort to elaborate a definition of the memoir genre and to identify the features that differentiate it from other types of writing about the self, mainly autobiography, is perceived in academic literature over the past twenty years. Previously, autobiography was the prestigious literary term associated with life writing, and as Helen Buss (2002) points out in her book, memoir has remained largely unexamined by literary critics. One prominent aspect of memoir is that of the hybridization between fiction and nonfiction, which is an outstanding feature in the corpus of texts analyzed in this study better and explains how each author elaborates, revises or adapts to different degrees the “actual” material on which they draw. The social dimension of memoir is another concern reflected in the literature review with a parallel echo in the corpus under analysis. The very definition of the term is not without its difficulties, and this first section details the major academic elaborations to offer a working definition for the present book. This theoretical introduction is necessary to contextualize the memoir as an object of study and apply it to a growing body of texts particularly detected in contemporary literature by Italian American and Italian Canadian women. Thus, it provides the major concepts which will reappear in the different chapters to aid the analysis of the selected sample of works.
Thomas Couser begins by indicating what this genre is not in order to define what it is: “Memoir is not fiction. Memoirs are not novels. As a nonfiction genre, memoir depicts the lives of real, not imagined, individuals” (2012, p. 15). However, the author then points to the hybridization between fiction and nonfiction as characteristic of the genre: “Today, memoirs often incorporate invented or enhanced material, and they often use novelistic techniques. Indeed, they are themselves a form of literary art” (p. 15). Although both novel and memoir imitate life and transform it into art, a main conceptual difference remains for Couser, who insists on the fact that memoir is presented and read as a nonfictional record or re-presentation of actual humans’ experience, while fiction creates its own lifelike reality.
A consequence of the predominant nonfictional nature of the memoir is that writers who choose this genre are more constrained in the creation of characters and are allowed less freedom than novelists (p. 171). Nonetheless, due to the hybridized nature of memoir, the supposed or transparent differences with the novel turn to be more blurred. This means that memoirists do take a great deal of artistic liberties regarding their material. As a matter of fact, as we will see, writers such as Caterina Edwards admit that nonfiction, the umbrella term in which memoir is primarily classified, requires using just as much imagination as writing a novel. This is how Kym Ragusa also reflects on the different limits of memory and the necessary role of the imagination: “I want to say that this is what I remember, but I know, at least I think I know, that it’s my imagination, filling in the space where my memory falters out of fear, confusion, shame.” (2006, p. 197). Notably, it is the suffering of trauma that restricts the ability to properly remember or the will to rely solely on memory. This is reflected in Edwards’ family disruption due to the genocide of Italian Istrians in the mid-twentieth century, in Ragusa’s paralyzing fear due to the threat of racial violence, and in Diane Di Prima’s account regarding the effects of physical and psychological violence by both of her parents during her childhood:
Details
- Pages
- X, 176
- Publication Year
- 2025
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781636675671
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781636675688
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781636675664
- DOI
- 10.3726/b21051
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2025 (January)
- Keywords
- transcultural narrative identities study memoir contemporary anglophone women authors italian diaspora
- Published
- New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2025. X, 176 pp.
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