Beautiful China

Lina Unali was born in Rome. She graduated at the University of Rome in 1959. After a sojourn in the United States as a Fulbright student, she won a competition for the Enrico Fermi Liceo of Genoa. She was Associate Professor at the University of Cagliari from the years 1969 to 1982 and Professor at the II University of Rome from 1983 to the present. She received a Fellowship at the National Taiwan University in 1986 from the American Academy of Science in Taipei, and has organised and chaired several workshops at the Conferences of the European Association of American Studies. Her publications include the books Stella d’India temi imperiali britannici Modelli di rappresentazione dell’India (1993, later published in English) and Rapporto sulla Cina (2012), as well as the articles “Americanization and Hybridization in The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan” (in Harold Bloom’s Amy Tan, 2009) and “Considerations on the Concept of the Western Canon, the Worldwide Canon, and the Production of New Literature” (in Positioning the New: Chinese American Literature and the Changing Image of the American Literary Canon 2010). Unali has also published poems in the Paterson Literary Review (2009, 2011, 2012, and 2014), as well as in Lan Xing and Agus. The recipient of several literary prizes, including the Alghero Donna for narrative, she has also authored a number of prose works, including Sardinia of Desire (1991), Andalusian General (2006, 2010), Voyage to Istanbul (2009), and 7 Stories amid Continents (2011).