Anglo-Italian literary identity in the writings of Margaret Collier, Giacinta Galletti and Joyce Salvadori

Capancioni, Claudia

Abstract

[From the introduction]:
This thesis will focus on an intertextual literary study of the writings of three generations of female writers in a relatively unknown Anglo-Italian family, the Galletti-Salvadoris. Margaret Collier Galletti di Cadilhac (1846-1928), her daughter, Giacinta Galletti Salvadori (1875-1960), and her granddaughter, Joyce Salvadori Lussu (1912-1998) were all unconventional travellers, writers, and activists. Their writings are powerful testimonies to the historical and intellectual changes in Europe from the end of the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. The inheritance of a maternal British background influenced the later Anglo-Italian generations of this family. It informs their multicultural identity, their international political and social consciousness, and their creation of an Anglo-Italian literary subjectivity, especially before, during and after the Second World War. Giacinta Galletti and Joyce Salvadori are products of a British maternal legacy that developed into a plural and progressive perspective on the European historical and intellectual context expressed in writing. Anglo-Italian Giacinta Galletti and Joyce Salvadori are not specifically British or Italian. Their struggle to find a narrative language which allows the representation of their familial, cultural and literary subjectivity, identifies concerns about the definition of a European identity and its literary dimension.

This study will uncover the dialogic interactions between the published and unpublished works of these three women, revealing the development of an intellectual representation of a cross-cultural Anglo-Italian female subjectivity. Although it recovers their literary writings by a combination of archival research and translation into English of the works written in Italian, this thesis analyses a selection of their travel and autobiographical writings in which the family's literary influences are revealed as 'intertextual dialogue[s]'. In the introduction to her autobiography written in Italian, Portrait (cose viste e vissute) (Portrait: The Things I Saw and Experienced, 1988), Joyce Salvadori claims of her family that their 'dissenting vein descends from their female kinsfolk, most of whom were English'. This thesis identifies a British maternal legacy and its influence in the representation of an Anglo-Italian identity in writing, The female descendants of the Galletti-Salvadori family present an original response to the complexity of a bilingual and bicultural identity. In the development of an Anglo-Italian consciousness, Margaret Collier, Giacinta Galletti and Joyce Salvadori embraced the difficulties, as well as the benefits, of a bicultural identity in their writing.

Citation

Capancioni, C. (2006). Anglo-Italian literary identity in the writings of Margaret Collier, Giacinta Galletti and Joyce Salvadori. (Thesis). University of Hull. Retrieved from https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4214646

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Oct 23, 2013
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 23, 2023
• Keywords: English
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4214646
• Additional Information: Department of English, The University of Hull
• Award Date: Sep 1, 2006