Female Filiations: A Festschrift for Adalgisa Giorgio: Romance Studies

Abstract

The aims of this double issue on Female Filiations in Romance Studies are twofold. On the one hand, the contributors seek to draw renewed attention to women as producers of art, sources of transgenerational memory, promoters of female emancipation and participants in networks of solidarity, networks that are powerful enough to challenge patriarchal hegemonies. On the other hand, this issue reflects the contributors’ desire to honour the scholarship of the outstanding female thinker Dr Adalgisa Giorgio, who has not only advanced our understanding of the literary representation of women, motherhood, maternal practices, daughterhood and sororities but also championed the values of intellectual uprightness, academic mentorship, female solidarity and intellectual transmission between generations of scholars. Born in the South of Italy, Giorgio has developed her expertise between three countries, Italy, Great Britain and New Zealand, and in the intersecting areas of Women’s Writing, Women’s Studies, Literary Criticism, Cultural Studies, Feminist Theory, Psychoanalysis, Politics and Translation Studies. Her wide-ranging interests have included culture and society in Naples and Southern Italy; literary representations of mothers and daughters in Italy, Western Europe and the world; Italian diaspora, family structures and motherhood in New Zealand; and expressions of identity in the narratives of Māori Italians. Her research has addressed the entangled topics of ethnic identity, motherhood, daughterhood, nomadism, migration, trauma, sexuality, gender, creativity, experimentalism, self-representation, ethics, class and intergenerational relations, but she has also contributed to theorizing the concepts of textuality, postmodernism, globalization, and precariousness. Giorgio has worked on a wide range of authors including Fabrizia Ramondino, Marosia Castaldi, Elsa Morante, Elena Ferrante, Mariateresa Di Lascia, Natalia Ginzburg, Francesca Sanvitale, Clara Sereni, Antonella Cilento, Edith Bruck, Silvia Ballestra, Rossana Campo, Isabella Santacroce, Sibilla Aleramo, Ermanno Rea, Giuseppe Montesano, Antonio Pascale, Gabriele Frasca, Eleonora De Fonseca Pimentel, Silvana La Spina, Igiaba Scego and many more. She has brought to light the most original and innovative traits of these writers while informing the contemporary reading and appreciation of them on an international scale. She is one of the founder-members of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing (CCWW, Institute of Languages, Cultures