Forging Transnational Identities in Italian American Chick Lit: The Novels of Adriana Trigiani and the Ethnic Bildungsroman

CLORINDA DONATO is professor of French and Italian at California State University, Long Beach, where she also directs the Clorinda Donato Center for Global Romance Languages and Translation Studies. She is an eighteenth-century scholar concerned with the transfer of knowledge through the translation of encyclopedic compilations. She is also concerned with gender in medical and literary accounts, the Catholic and Protestant Enlightenment, Italian diaspora studies, and the history of the book. She has published more than one hundred articles on these topics, as well as coedited projects, including “Fanny Hill Now,” a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life, with Nicholas Nace in 2019.In 2015, she coedited Enlightenment Spain and the Encyclopédie Méthodique with Ricardo López, and in 2020, she authored The Life and Legend of Catterina Vizzani: Sexual Identity, Science and Sensationalism in Eighteenth-Century Italy and England, both with Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. Also, in 2020, she coedited with Stephen Cooper John Fante's Ask the Dust: A Joining of Voices and Views, with Fordham University Press in their Italian American series. A forthcoming collection of essays, Translation and Transfer of Knowledge in Encyclopedic Compilations 1680–1830s, coedited with Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, will appear in 2021 with the University of Toronto Press.