The Value of Worthless Lives : Writing Italian American Immigrant Autobiographies / Ilaria Serra.
Serra, Ilaria, author.
2022
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Title The Value of Worthless Lives : Writing Italian American Immigrant Autobiographies / Ilaria Serra.
Author Serra, Ilaria, author.
ISBN 9780823293308
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823293308
Published New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2022]
Copyright ©2007
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (240 p.)
Other Standard Identifiers 10.1515/9780823293308 doi
Summary The writer Giuseppe Prezzolini said that Italian immigrants left behind tears and sweat but not "words," making their lives in America mostly in silence, their memories private and stories untold. In this innovative portrait of the Italian-American experience, these lives are no longer hidden. Ilaria Serra offers the first comprehensive study of a largely ignored legacy-the autobiographies written by immigrants. Here she looks closely at fifty-eight representative works written during the high tide of Italian migration. Scouring archives, discovering diaries, and memoirs in private houses and forgotten drawers, Serra recovers the voices of the first generation-bootblacks and poets, film directors and farmers, miners, anarchists, and seamstresses-compelled to tell their stories. Mostly unpublished, often thickly accented, these tales of ordinary men and women are explored in nuanced detail, organized to reflect how they illuminate the realities of work, survival, identity, and change. Moving between history and literature, Serra presents each as the imaginative record of a self in the making and the collective story of the journey to selfhood that is the heart of the immigrant experience.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
In Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
Fordham University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
Available in Other Form print 9780823226788
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Frontmatter
Contents
Introduction
PART I
1 Autobiography: The Literary Genre of Immigration
PART II
2 The Working-Class Writer
3 Immigrant Artists
4 The Spiritual Immigrant
5 Immigrant Women
6 Toward Success
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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