Italian Folktales in America
The Verbal Art of an Immigrant Woman
By Elizabeth Mathias and Richard Raspa
Paperback
ISBN: 9780814321225
Pages: 352 Size: 6x9
Illustrations: 32 black and white images
eBOOK
ISBN: 9780814338360
Review
The tales are indicative of a great verbal artist…The introductory material is extensive and competent…A rare case study of a folk artist over a long period.
— Library Journal
In 1941, while studying folklore at Wayne University with Professor Emelyn Gardner, Bruna Todesco collected from her mother, Clementina, the twenty-two märchen and legends presented in this book. Bruna, her mother, and her father, John, immigrated to America in 1930 from their native village of Faller in the Veneto region of northern Italy.
Not just made up of the recorded texts, this book is also built on the reminiscences of that storyteller and some of her old neighbors in her birthplace, and is a record by two resourceful fieldworkers of what it takes to study memory culture. The result is a work that greatly enriches our understanding of who told (and tells) märchen to whom, why and how they are told, and, perhaps most important, under what conditions.
This study is not only an exemplary presentation of folk narrative, but also a sensitive and moving view of the way folklore exists in a real person's life. Mathias and Raspa make Clementina Todesco's narratives available to the rest of us, and, equally and perhaps more important, they help us better understand the nature and character of the immigrant experience in America.
– B. A. Botkin Prize Committee
The tales are indicative of a great verbal artist . . . The introductory material is extensive and competent . . . A rare case study of a folk artist over a long period.
– Library Journal