Personal Effects - (Critical Studies in Italian America) by Nancy Caronia & Edvige Giunta (Paperback)

About the Book

The two editors and eighteen scholars and creative nonfiction writers offer a lucid view of a writer who has produced one of the most provocative bodies of memoir writing in contemporary US literature, a scholar who has enriched our understanding of Virginia Woolf, and a teacher who has transformed countless lives.

Book Synopsis

A lucid view of one of the most important Italian American female authors of our time, Louise DeSalvo.

Celebrating one of the most important Italian American female authors of our time, Personal Effects offers a lucid view of Louise DeSalvo as a writer who has produced a vast and provocative body of memoir writing, a scholar who has enriched our understanding of Virginia Woolf, and a teacher who has transformed countless lives. More than an anthology, Personal Effects represents an author case study and an example for modern Italian American interdisciplinary scholarship.

Personal Effects examines DeSalvo's memoirs as works that push the boundaries of the most controversial genre of the past few decades. In these works, the author fearlessly explores issues such as immigration, domesticity, war, adultery, illness, mental health, sexuality, the environment, and trauma through the lens of gender, ethnic, and working-class identity. Alongside her groundbreaking scholarship, DeSalvo's memoirs attest to the power and influence of this feminist Italian American writer.

Review Quotes

The hard work, imagination, diligence, creativity, and exemplary self-discipline that underpin DeSalvo's Woolf scholarship also shape her excavations and the resulting memoirs... This volume should be of interest to all whose own scholarly work on Virginia Woolf has been inspired and sustained by Louise DeSalvo.-- "Virginia Woolf Miscellany"

The essays in Personal Effects do more than bear witness to the extraordinary achievement of Louise DeSalvo; they extend and amplify her inquiry into the nature of self, the politics of identity, the consequences of trauma. No study of memoir, of biography, of the role of literary criticism in the understanding of our time, can be complete without this multifaceted colloquy. Like the work of DeSalvo herself, this is a book of heartfelt intelligence and brilliant passion.---Richard Hoffman, author of Half the House, and Love & Fury

Wide-ranging, sophisticated, and stylish, Personal Effects is both a brilliant tribute to a powerful scholar-memoirist and a significant contribution to Italian-American studies and cultural studies more generally. It is a collection to savor!---Sandra Mortola Gilbert, author of The Culinary Imagination

With equal parts scholarship and creativity, Personal Effects penetrates the diversity and importance of DeSalvo's body of work. These thoughtful, disquieting, and insightful essays perfectly mirror the very essence of this vital American author.---Domenica Ruta, author of With or Without You

About the Author

Nancy Caronia (Edited By)
Nancy Caronia is a lecturer at University of Rhode Island. She teaches in the Honors Program, Gender & Women's Studies, and in the departments of English and Writing and Rhetoric. She works on issues of transnationalism and globalization in contemporary American and Anglophone ethnic literature and film. Her scholarly essays, reviews, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Essays on Italian American Literature and Culture, New Delta Review, and Don't Tell Mama! The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2013. Her introduction to Casting Off will appear in Bordighera's reprint of DeSalvo's novel.

Edvige Giunta (Edited By)
Edvige Giunta is professor of English at New Jersey City University, where she teaches memoir and other literature and writing courses. She is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors and Dire l'indicibile. She is co- editor of The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (with Louise DeSalvo); Italian American Writers on New Jersey (with Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan); Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (with Kathleen Zamboni McCormick); and Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women's Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora (with Joseph Sciorra).