6. In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Walker writes of her fortuitous encounter with Hurston’s work, which in turn led to her pilgrimage to Hurston’s unmarked grave in a Florida cemetery, to the reprint of the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God and the publication of the anthology I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, and to Hurston’s enormous impact on African American literature as well as, more broadly, on American literature. See especially “Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life” (3–14), “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan Review” (83–92), and “Looking for Zora” (93–116). See also Mary Helen Washington’s foreword and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s afterword to Their Eyes Were Watching God (vii–xiv and 185–95) and Alice Walker’s dedication and Mary Helen Washington’s introduction to I Love Myself When I Am Laughing (1–5 and 7–25). The publication of slave narratives similarly testifies to the necessary relationship between literature as an intellectual phenomenon and literature as the material production of the books themselves. Barolini’s own journey in search of Italian American women literary predecessors, described in her essay “Looking for Mari Tomasi” (Chiaroscuro 73–82), parallels Walker’s journey in search of Hurston.

7. Janet Zandy, who is herself Italian American, has provided compelling critical discussions of working-class identity in the introductions to her two anthologies. See also the special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly on working-class studies edited by Zandy.

8. In The Cheese and the Worms, Carlo Ginsburg describes such histories as “microhistories.” Catherine L. Albanese uses Ginsburg’s theory in her work of recovery of immigrant history, The Cobbler’s Universe.

9. See Cafarelli, “No Butter on Our Bread: Anti-Intellectual Stereotyping of Italian Americans.”

10. On Chiaroscuro see reviews by Bona and Signorelli-Pappas.

11. See Barolini, “The Case of the Missing Italian American Writers” (Chiaroscuro 64–72).

12. Rosa, an autobiographical account of immigrant life by the illiterate Rosa Cassettari, transcribed and edited by Marie Hall Ets, is presently out of print. For a discussion of Rosa’s place in the Italian American canon see Gardaphé, Italian Signs, American Streets (31–36).

13. Another novel by an Italian American author that can, like Umbertina, be placed in the tradition of the feminist consciousness-raising novel of the 1970s is Dorothy Bryant’s Ella Price’s Journal (1972). See Barbara Horn, “The Education of Ella Price,” the afterword to the 1997 reprint by The Feminist Press, and Pipino, “Ella Price’s Journal: The Subv/mersion of Ethnic and Sexual Identity.” In Bryant’s novel the protagonist is not Italian American, though her best friend is (a tactic used by contemporary Italian American writers, for example, Agnes Rossi in Split Skirt). On strategies of ethnic self-identification see Gardaphé, “Narrative in the Philosophic Mode” and “Epilogue” (Italian Signs, American Streets 172–98), and Giunta, “Speaking Through Silences: Ethnicity in the Writings of Contemporary Italian American Women.”

14. In an interview, Barolini stated that she saw Marguerite as the important character in the novel (interview with Greenberg 94).