Italy and American Female Imagination is the first study to trace the significance of Italy—both the physical place and imagined idea—to the identities of middle-class US women from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Debra Bernardi takes a transnational and feminist approach to texts by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary McCarthy, Andrea Lee, Elizabeth Gilbert, Jhumpa Lahiri, and others, as well as to film, television, magazine articles, and interviews with expats, all to illuminate not only Italy’s influence on American identity but also how gender, race, and class inflect that influence. Encounters with Italy, Bernardi shows, have profoundly shifted American women’s ways of thinking about sex and romance, families and homes, and rules and regulations. While women of color do not experience Italy as an entirely liberatory space, and attitudes toward Italy have shifted over time, the women writers discussed here consistently find expanded possibilities for female selfhood on Italian soil. Bridging feminist literary studies, cultural studies, and history, Italy and American Female Imagination captures and complicates Italy’s allure and casts new light on the process of transnational identity formation.

Debra Bernardi is Professor Emerita in English and Gender Studies at Carroll College and coeditor of Our Sisters’ Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women.