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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 Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: “Habit of Mind” -- Louise DeSalvo’s “Even in Death, La Bella Figura”: A Meditation on Honor, Respect, and the Silences That Bind -- The Poetics of Trauma: Intertextuality, Rhythm, and Concision in Vertigo and Writing as a Way of Healing -- Fixing and Fictioning: Memory and Catholicism in Vertigo -- Portrait of the Mother as a Writer and Researcher -- Louise DeSalvo: Essaying Memoir -- On Vulnerability and Risk: Learning to Write and Teach Memoir as a Student of Louise DeSalvo -- Fixing Things: What Louise DeSalvo Has Taught Me about Writing -- Dark Whiteness and Literacy without Assimilation: DeSalvo’s Unlikely Narrative -- Mixing Bowl: On Crazy in the Kitchen, DeSalvo in the Classroom, and the Day I Got into Hunter -- Furthering the Voyage: Reconsidering DeSalvo in Contemporary Woolf Studies -- The Context of Louise DeSalvo’s Impact: Incest in Virginia Woolf’s Biography -- “Thirty- seven Is the Unraveling Time” and Other Fictions of Fidelity in the Works of Louise DeSalvo -- Life Online: Skating and Breaking the Surface of the Self -- The Fruits of Her Labor: Louise DeSalvo’s Memoirs of Food and Family -- Mapping the Female Ethnic Self in the Family Battleground: Vertigo and the Greek American Novel -- DeSalvo’s Rialto: On Moving as a Livable Bridge -- The Knife and the Bread, the Brutal and the Sacred: Louise DeSalvo at the Family Table -- Afterword. Crazy in the Study: Trying to Claim a Tradition in Louise DeSalvo’s Accented Writing -- Contributors -- Index
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