"Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991), whose writing career spans nearly a sixty-year period of Italian history, has been traditionally acclaimed for her clear realistic prose and for her ability to portray, through the microcosm of the family, a macrocosm of Italian culture.

Yet little criticism concerns itself with the specific perspectives and voices of her narrating daughters and mothers, and the pre-oedipal narratives within the ideological boundaries of "family" and "society." Departing from much of the criticism that maintains that Ginzburg's writing is "genderless" (and from Ginzburg's own polemic against feminism), Picarazzi underscores Ginzburg's insistent return to the maternal and maintains that her stories are gender specific. She argues that Ginzburg adopted a distinct aesthetic by allowing her family stories to be narrated through a female narrating "I." This volume focuses on the broad theme of the maternal by tracing the development of the voices of Ginzburg's narrating daughters, mothers, and sisters.

Their texts read as auto/biographies; that is, they are narratives about both the self and the other."--BOOK JACKET.