Rewriting the Journey in Contemporary Italian Literature

by Blum, Cinzia Sartini

• ISBN13: 9780802097897
• ISBN10: 0802097898
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781442689015
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-09-15
• Publisher: Univ of Toronto Pr
• More Book Details

Summary

The mobility of women is a central issue in feminist analysis of literary works and historical periods. Rewriting the Journey in Contemporary Italian Literature explores the concept of the journey from feminist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial perspectives, in order to offer an alternative understanding of 'moving.' Cinzia Sartini Blum examines the new literature of migration in Italian and journeys in the works of Biancamaria Frabotta, Dacia Maraini, Toni Maraini, and Maria Pace Ottieri, to demonstrate that women writers and migrant authors in contemporary Italy present journeys as events that are beyond heroic modern exploration and postmodern fragmentation.Using the mythical figure of Gradiva, Blum shows how contemporary Italian women writers have reinvented Gradiva to reveal subjectivities that challenge and overcome the postmodern melancholia and nihilism prevalent in contemporary male writers and thinkers. She also considers the connection between metaphorical and literal mobility, the role of the intellectual as cultural intermediary, the roles of women in cultural encounters within mass migrations, and how migrancy is a way of being in the postcolonial world.An impeccable piece of original scholarship, Rewriting the Journey in Contemporary Italian Literature will be of interest to feminist, literary, and postcolonial scholars.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. 3
Beyond the End of the Journey	p. 11
Gradiva's Journey: Genealogy of a Feminist Trope	p. 43
Biancamaria Frabotta's Lead: From fuga to viandanza	p. 91
Walking in the Shoes of Another: Dacia Maraini's Departures and Returns	p. 132
Exile as the Ultimate Utopia: Toni Maraini's vivere vagabondo	p. 169
Bridging Cultures: Figures of Mediation	p. 202
Bringing Home the Exotic	p. 204
The Journey in Migrant Literature	p. 221
Conclusion: Toward an Interactive Universalism	p. 255
Notes	p. 259
Works Cited	p. 347
Index of Names	p. 373
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