Forging Shoah memories: Italian women writers, Jewish identity, and the Holocaust

Though there has been an outpouring in recent decades of historical studies and cultural criticism related to the Holocaust, the experiences of women have too often been marginalized in this research.

In particular, women's literary representations and testimonies of the Holocaust have not received their proper due, and while feminist scholarship since the 1970s has gone some way toward addressing this lacuna, there are very few distinctively Italian examples of such writing that have seen publication and garnered scholarly attention.

This study fills this gap by deploying a gender-based analysis of Italian women's experiences of living and writing the Shoah, encompassing works from a variety of literary genres set against a complex historical backdrop.