Found in translation
The epistolary friendship of Rosika Schwimmer and Ignazio Silone
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22157199 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rishona Zimring (Lewis & Clark College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 223-240 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Feminist Modernist Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2469-2921 • E-ISSN: 2469-293X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/24692921.2025.2537498 |
| OpenAlex | W4412803762 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
This essay foregrounds two figures previously neglected in feminist modernist studies and modernist studies more generally: Rosika Schwimmer and Ignazio Silone. Their unpublished correspondence constitutes a poignant and significant episode in the rise of modernism. Schwimmer consulted extensively on Silone’s first novel, Fontamara, a global sensation in its time that has long since fallen into obscurity. She was one of the most conspicuous feminist activists of her day; he became one of the most famous literary anti-Fascists. The story of Schwimmer and Silone’s epistolary friendship offers a new perspective on global modernist networks—on intercultural and multilingual orbits, connections, influences, and intimacies. The politics of feminism and anti-Fascism converged in the emergence of a novel that told an untold story, that of oppressed, victimized workers laboring and trapped in a nightmarish world not unlike Kafka’s, in a state of paralysis not unlike that of Joyce’s Dubliners. The effort to translate and circulate this modernist novel brought the two correspondents together at the end of her career, and the beginning of his, creating its own dynamics of intimacy and influence. Their relationship represents a previously neglected chapter in the histories of both feminism and literary modernism
Art · Friendship · Linguistics · Literature · Chemistry · Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre · Social Psychology · Biochemistry
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |