While other Italian American works have also told these stories, Umbertina stands out for its understanding of the cultural and social implications of uprooting and for its concern with situating its characters’ lives against clearly outlined historical events: the unification of Italy, the migration out of Southern Italy, the two world wars, the Great Depression, and the economic boom in post-war Italy. Umbertina privileges the stories of the quotidian struggles of immigrants, which have traditionally been left out of official historical narratives.8 And most significantly, the novel foregrounds the seldom-heard perspectives and voices of women. An epic feminist narrative, Barolini’s first novel offers almost a textbook case of immigrant history, as experienced by the women of a family that moves from the absolute poverty of peasantry to the oppression of being immigrant and working class to the material comfort of middle-class life, but remains haunted by the shadows of its past.

Umbertina has, over the years, been taught in several colleges and universities and written about extensively by a variety of scholars, including such Italian American scholars as Mary Jo Bona, Fred Gardaphé, Mary Frances Pipino, Anthony Tamburri, Carol Bonomo Albright, and Robert Viscusi. These critics have focused on issues such as the negotiation between Italian and American cultures and the figure of the grandmother as a recurring device that Italian American writers employ to mediate their relationship to ethnicity, as well as the quest for female selfhood that places Umbertina within the tradition of the feminist bildungsroman. Indeed, Umbertina’s status as an Italian American classic is undisputed. To make a case for Umbertina as an American classic, though, one must make a case for Italian American literature—and particularly Italian American women’s literature—as American literature.

The attention recently received by Italian American women writers such as Rita Ciresi, Tina De Rosa, Louise DeSalvo, Sandra M. Gilbert, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Diane Di Prima, Dorothy Bryant, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Donna Masini, Carole Maso, Cris Mazza, Marianna De Marco Torgovnick, and Agnes Rossi, to mention some of the most well-known contemporary authors, suggests that the intellectual climate is becoming more hospitable to both women writers and Italian American writers. Yet many readers and critics cling to anti-intellectual stereotypes against Italian Americans and are still reluctant to recognize some of these authors as Italian American.9 Such stereotypes have been relentlessly exposed by Barolini in essays such as “Becoming a Literary Person Out of Context,” “Buried Alive by Language,” “Writing to a Brick Wall,” and “After-Thoughts on Italian American Women Writers,” some of which appear in Chiaroscuro: Essays of Identity, a book that confirms Barolini’s place in the Italian American intellectual avant-garde.10