Examines the liberating power of speech and its influence on generations of Italian American writers.
In By the Breath of Their Mouths, Mary Jo Bona examines the oral uses of language and the liberating power of speech in Italian American writing, as well as its influences on generations of assimilated Italian American writers. Probing and wide-ranging, Bona’s analysis reveals the lasting importance of storytelling and folk narrative, their impact on ethnic, working-class, and women’s literatures, and their importance in shaping multiethnic literature. Drawing on a wide range of material from several genres, including oral biographies, fiction, film, poetry, and memoir, and grounded in recent theories of narrative and autobiography, postcolonial theory, and critical multiculturalism, By the Breath of Their Mouths is must reading for students in Italian American studies in particular and ethnic studies and multiethnic literature more generally.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Justice/Giustizia—Private Justice and the Folkloric Community in the World of Italian Americans
2. Faith/Fede—Plenty to Confess: Women and (Italian) American Catholicism
3. Story/Racconto—Una chiacchierata nel passato: Rosa and Marie of Rosa: The Life of an Italian Immigrant
4. Land/Terra—Village People in Guido D’Agostino’s Novels
5. History Singer/Cantastorie—Vernacular Voices in Paule Marshall’s and Tina De Rosa’s Kunstlerromane
6. Precursor/Precursore—Mother’s Tongue: Italian American Daughters and Female Precursors
7. Death/Morte—What They Talk About When They Talk About Death
8. Revival/Risorgimento—Stories Continue: Shaping U.S. Italian American Writing
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Mary Jo Bona is Distinguished SUNY Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Among her many books, she is the author of By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America and coeditor, with Irma Maini, of Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates, also by SUNY Press.
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