Research Catalog

Title

Embroidered stories : interpreting women's domestic needlework from the Italian diaspora / edited by Edvige Giunta and Joseph Sciorra.

Publication

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2014.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Giunta, Edvige
• Sciorra, Joseph

Description

xiv, 380 pages : illustrations; 25 cm

Summary

"For Italian immigrants and their descendants, needlework represents a marker of identity, a cultural touchstone as powerful as pasta and Neapolitan music. Out of the artifacts of their memory and imagination, Italian immigrants and their descendants used embroidering, sewing, knitting, and crocheting to help define who they were and who they have become. This book is an interdisciplinary collection of creative work by authors of Italian origin and academic essays. The creative works from thirty-seven contributors include memoir, poetry, and visual arts while the collection as a whole explores a multitude of experiences about and approaches to needlework and immigration from a transnational perspective, spanning the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. At the center of the book, over thirty illustrations represent Italian immigrant women's needlework. The text reveals the many processes by which a simple object, or even the memory of that object, becomes something else through literary, visual, performance, ethnographic, or critical reimagining. While primarily concerned with interpretations of needlework rather than the needlework itself, the editors and contributors to Embroidered Stories remain mindful of its history and its associated cultural values, which Italian immigrants brought with them to the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina and passed on to their descendants"--

Subject

• Needlework > Italy
• Women and the decorative arts > Italy
• Italians > Foreign countries > Ethnic identity
• HISTORY / Europe / Italy
• ART / Folk & Outsider Art

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Threads of Women -- Skills and Artistry -- Factory Girls -- Environmental Sites -- Lost, Discarded, Reclaimed.

ISBN

• 9781628460131 (hardback : alkaline paper)
• 162846013X (hardback : alkaline paper)
• 9781628460148 (ebook) (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

• 2013046793
• 99960182999

OCLC

• 865574903
• 2013046793
• SCSB-5757938

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries