This book examines the processes involved in writing the lives of women, both as autobiographies and as biographies. Some essays are theoretical discussions about the constructions of self-articulation in women's life writing. Others are more autobiographical, emphasizing the importance of self-articulation for creating possibilities for self-direction. Adopting different theoretical approaches, chapters in this collection highlight the connections between subjectivity and history, feminist concerns about mothering and the mother-daughter relationships, autobiography, discourse and its framing of the relationship between text and life, and the ethics of constructing biographies. The book is divided into three parts: the first part focuses on the process of writing lives as expressed but also contested in epistolary narratives, autobiography and historical fiction. The second part considers notions of female genealogy and the relationship with the maternal, both biological and symbolic. The third part comprises articles which deal with writing outside geographical and metaphorical borders.

An intriguing analysis of how place constructs memory and how memory constructs place, Remembering the Holocaust shows how visiting sites such as Auschwitz shapes the transfer of Holocaust memory from one generation to the next. Through the discussion of a range of memoirs and novels, including Landscapes of Memory by Ruth Kluger, Too Many Men by Lily Brett, The War After by Anne Karpf and Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, Remembering the Holocaust reveals the pivotal yet complicated role of place in each generation's writing about the Holocaust. This book provides an insightful and nuanced investigation of the effect of the Holocaust upon families, from survivors of the genocide to members of the second and even third generations of families involved. By deploying an innovative combination of generational and literary study of Holocaust survivor families focussed on place, Remembering the Holocaust makes an important contribution to the field of Holocaust Studies that will be of interest to scholars and anyone interested in Holocaust remembrance.

This book highlights the centrality of the autobiographical enterprise to Italian women’s writing through the twentieth century—a century that has frequently been referred to as the century of the self. Ursula Fanning addresses the thorny issue of essentialism potentially involved in underlining links between women’s writing and autobiographical modes, and ultimately rejects it in favor of an argument based on the cultural, linguistic, and literary marginalization of women writers within the Italian context. It is concerned with Italian women writers’ various ways of grappling with constructions of subjectivity throughout the century and sets out to explore them. Fanning reads autobiographical writing as subject to many of the same constraints as fiction and, in doing so, draws attention to the significance of the recurring use of the terms “pure” and “impure” in many critical and theoretical discussions of the autobiographical (where “pure” is used to suggest a truthful representation of a life, while “impure” suggests the messy undertaking of mixing lived experience with fiction). Recurring patterns and paradigms are found in the works of the various writers considered (eighteen in all), and these paradigms are analyzed through close readings of their works. These close readings offer insights into approaches to the constructions of subjectivity in the narratives and are informed by feminist theories. The chapters focus on selves in relationship, taking their lead from the patterns unfolding in the writers’ work, hence the subjects are constructed as daughters (with different views of the self in relation to fathers and mothers), within the confines of the romantic relationship (which involves reconsiderations and rewritings of the romance plot), as maternal subjects, and as writers (with an eye on their relationship to the literary canon, as well as to the relationship with readers). This book argues that there is such a thing as gendered subjectivity and that its constructions may be traced through the texts analyzed.

This edited volume is the first to propose new readings of Italian and transnational female-authored texts through the lens of Trauma Studies. Illuminating a space that has so far been left in the shadows, Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women’s Writing provides new insights into how the trope of trauma shapes the narrative, temporal and linguistic dimension of these works. The various contributions delineate a landscape of female-authored Italian and transnational trauma narratives and their complex textual negotiation of suffering and pathos, from the twentieth century to the present day. These zones of trauma engender a new aesthetics and a new reading of history and cultural memory as an articulation of female creativity and resistance against a dominant cultural and social order.

Norms of embodied behaviour for males and females, as promoted in mainstream Western public arenas of popular culture and the everyday, continue to work, overtly and covertly, as definitive and restrictive barriers to the realm of possibilities of embodied gender expression and appreciation. They serve to disempower and marginalize those not inclined to embody according to such dichotomous models. This book explores the ramifications of the way our gendered, sexed and culturally constructed bodies are situated toward notions of difference and highlights the need to safeguard the social and emotional well-being of those who do not fit comfortably with dominant norms of masculine/feminine behaviour, as deemed appropriate to biological sex. The book interrogates gender inequitable machinations of education and performance arts disciplines by which educators and arts practitioners train, teach, choreograph, and direct those with whom they work, and theorizes ways of broadening personal and social notions of possible, aesthetic, and acceptable embodiment for all persons, regardless of biological sex or sexual orientation. The author’s own struggles as a performance artist, educator, and person in the everyday, as well as the findings of empirical fieldwork with educators, performance arts practitioners, and high school students, are employed to illustrate and advocate the need for self reflexive scrutiny of existing and hidden inequities regarding the embodiment of gender within one’s own habitual perspectives, taste, and practices.

In this brave and original work, Federica Clementi focuses on the mother-daughter bond as depicted in six works by women who experienced the Holocaust, sometimes with their mothers, sometimes not. The daughtersÕ memoirs, which record the Òall-too-humanÓ qualities of those who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, show that the Holocaust cannot be used to neatly segregate lives into the categories of before and after. ClementiÕs discussions of differences in social status, along with the persistence of antisemitism and patriarchal structures, support this point strongly, demonstrating the tenacity of traumaÑindividual, familial, and collectiveÑamong Jews in twentieth-century Europe.

The chapter Experiencing Male Dominance in Swedish Film Production” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Women writers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy reinvigorated the modern epistolary novel through their re-fashioning of the genre as a tool for examining women's roles and experiences. Addressing the Letter argues that many epistolary novels purposely tie narrative structure to thematic content, creating in the process powerful texts that reflect and challenge literary and socio-cultural norms. Through the lens of the genre, Laura A. Salsini considers how the works of authors including the Marchesa Colombi, Sibilla Aleramo, Gianna Manzini, Natalia Ginzburg, and Oriana Fallaci highlight such issues as love, the loss of ideals, lack of communication and connection, and feminist ideology. She also analyses what may be the first woman-authored Italian example of epistolary fiction: Orintia Romagnuoli Sacrati's Lettere di Giulia Willet (1818). In their reworking of the epistolary narrative form, Italian women writers challenged dominant assumptions about female behaviours, roles, relationships, and sexuality in modern Italy.

This book explores how women's relationship with food has been represented in Italian literature, cinema, scientific writings and other forms of cultural expression from the 19th century to the present. Italian women have often been portrayed cooking and serving meals to others, while denying themselves the pleasure of the table. The collection presents a comprehensive understanding of the symbolic meanings associated with food and of the way these intersect with Italian women's socio-cultural history and the feminist movement. From case studies on Sophia Loren and Elena Ferrante, to analyses of cookbooks by Italian chefs, each chapter examines the unique contribution Italian culture has made to perceiving and portraying women in a specific relation to food, addressing issues of gender, identity and politics of the body.

Anything and everything may come under the rubric of violence in a society that is by and large addicted to the images of violence that are an inescapable part of contemporary reality. In the wake of recent international events, many have come to accept the perpetration of violence as morally acceptable and a just enterprise towards peace. But what is violence? How do we identify something or somebody as violent? Is violence justifiable? If so, under what circumstances? Violent Depictions addresses these and other questions on the role and nature of violence in a range of different national and historical contexts. Violent Depictions is a reflection on the relationship between violence and representation and includes a number of thematic categories such as youth violence in films, violence against women in literary and cinematic texts, gendered representations of terrorism, the violence of colonial encounters and of the remembering of institutionalised violence.