the two aspects of Escolar’s originality come together most powerfully beginning in chapter 3, on “true” romance novels. Escolar shows here and throughout the rest of the book how works sometimes looked down on as mere genre novels actually created space for the representation of repressed episodes and a more inclusive subjectivity. These hybrid, or “borderline” as she calls them, works give rise to a “positive model of witnessing enabled by melodrama and fantasy” (75). Thus Luciana Peverelli’s never-translated 1944 novel La lunga notte (The Long Night) turns out to be not just a melodramatic love triangle crowned by a happy ending but “the earliest known Italian novel” to recount direct experience of the deportation of Rome’s Jews, the partisan bombing of Via Rasella, and the retaliatory massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine.
See Chapter 3, "Happily Ever after Redemption: Luciana Peverelli's "True" Romance Novels of Occupied Rome."
I have not read this but the title of this chapter is similar to a previously-published article by Escolar which is also in the database.
A review of the book by Molly Tambor, published in The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 4, October 2020, Pages 1545–1547, states that: