Author Beatrice Melodia Festa

Beatrice Melodia Festa

Beatrice Melodia Festa is a PhD researcher, Honorary Research Fellow in American Literature, and Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Verona. Her research interests include identity theory, technology and the new media, African-American narratives, and the relationship between literature and culture. She holds a Master’s Degree and a Double Joint Master’s (MA) in American Studies from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and The City College of New York. Among her recent publications are essays on cyberfiction, American literature and the new media, and prison narratives. Her research now prominently focusses on American prison literature, William Faulkner, and virtual identity in contemporary American novels.

Depictions of Shame: White Identity and Cultural Blackness in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner

Beatrice Melodia Festa

Articles, Issue 10 2020-21

It would be easy to argue that any critical discourse concerning the metaphor of “shame” in the South has to be interpreted in terms of race. As recent scholarly work has asserted, “Shame is used in America to ... Read More...

Cold Reality: Revisions of War in John Knowles’ "Phineas" and A Separate Peace

Respectability Politics and the Culture of Dissemblance in Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Jack Hill’s Foxy Brown

“It was only the darkened house that could contain her”: Containing Forms in The Scarlet Letter

“Seeming Strangeness”: Mina Loy’s Poetics of Disruption and Julia Kristeva’s Semiotic/Symbolic Model

The State Department’s Northern Ireland Special Envoys and the redemption of the Good Friday Agreement

“a settled place”: Reproductive Performance in the Liberties and The Liberties

‘The Ethics of Quantum Colonialism’: Navigating American Racial Anxiety in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became

Review: Lahr, Arthur Miller: American Witness

Review: Robert Collins, Noraid and The Northern Ireland Troubles, 1970-1994

Review: Brian Yothers, Melville’s Mirrors: Literary Criticism and America’s Most Elusive Author

Review: Charles L. Chavis Jr., The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State

Review: Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr. Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South

Review: Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War

Review: Katherine Manthorne, Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex.

The IAAS's Americanista: An Interview with Catherine Gander (IAAS Chair)

From Mitchelstown to Michigan: Kevin Roche’s Formative Years

Depictions of Shame: White Identity and Cultural Blackness in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner