Public history, private stories
Subtitle: Italian women's autobiography
By: Graziella Parati.
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Minneapolis
Language: eng
Number of pages: 194
Subjects: Italian prose literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism.; Autobiography -- Women authors; Public opinion in literature.; Women and literature -- Italy.; Privacy in literature.; Women in literature.
Description: In this important volume, Graziella Parati examines the ways in which Italian women writers articulate their identities through autobiography - a public act that is also the creation of a private life. Considering autobiographical writings by five women writers from the seventeenth century to the present, Parati draws important connections between self-writing and the debate over women's roles, both traditional and transgressive.

Parati considers the first prose autobiography written by an Italian woman - Camilla Faa Gonzaga's 1622 memoir - as her beginning point, citing it as a central "pre-text." Parati then examines the autobiographies of Enif Robert, Fausta Cialente, Rita Levi Montalcini, and Luisa Passerini.

Through her discussion of these women's writings, she demonstrates the complex negotiations over identity contained within them, negotiations that challenge dichotomies between male and female, maternal and paternal, and private and public. Public History, Private Stories is a compelling exploration of the disparate identities created by these women through the act of writing autobiography.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 159-188) and index.