Narrative and Imperative: The First Fifty Years of Italian Holocaust Writing (1944-1994)

Narrative & Imperative is the first book in English on Italian Holocaust writing as a whole. Risa Sodi explores the work of eight representative authors, including the internationally famous (Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani, and Elsa Morante) and the lesser known (Giacomo Debenedetti, Paolo Maurensig, Liana Millu, Bruno Piazza, and Giuliana Tedeschi). She examines issues of genre, language, gender, and facticity while situating the works studied within the fields of European and Holocaust letters. A brief history of the Italian Jews – the oldest Jewish community in Europe – opens the book, and the conclusion brings the study up to recent times.