This first full-length study in English on seventeenth-century Italian travel writing enriches our understanding of an unusually fertile period for Italian contributions to the genre. The intrinsic qualities of this literature can now be grasped in terms of the larger question of cultural identity in Italy. For Hester, the specifically literary characteristics of Italian travel writing”including its humanism or Petrarchism”highlight the classic eminence throughout Europe of a prestigious tradition inherent to Italy, one compensating then for the peninsula's lack of a national political identity. Appeals to the cultural authority of that tradition represent a means of addressing and overcoming anxieties about the Italian subject's diasporic status during the "Golden Age" of European global colonial expansion. Self-funded travelers Francesco Carletti, Pietro Della Valle, Francesco Belli, Francesco Negri, and Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri are the major authors studied who journeyed through Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and America.

The first comprehensive review of all extant "Italian" chronicles set in the Philippine Islands, this book juxtaposes "Filipino" Otherness with the unique condition of "Italian" ambivalence and alterity within Europe. This book's contribution to the critical studies of travel is the opening of an analytical middle ground, highlighting the ambivalence of Italian chroniclers while acknowledging their participation in epistemological practices subsumed within the broader enterprise of conquest. Beyond the role of travel writing in colonial episteme, the book also situates the act of writing about one’s travels in instances of national character building (in Italy’s case) and in attempts of constructing a national historiography (in the Philippines' case). This manner of nuancing literary productions by the West while navigating its implications in the East, specifically, how pre-Unification “Italian” travel informed nationalist constructions in the Revolutionary Philippines, could enrich our understanding of and refract monolithic conceptions of metropole−periphery relations.

Transnational Italian Studies is specifically targeted at a student audience and is designed to be used as a key text when approaching the disciplinary field of Italian studies. It allows the study of Italian culture to be construed and practised not simply as the inquiry into a national tradition but as the study of the interaction of cultural practices both within Italy itself and in those parts of the world that have witnessed the extent of Italian mobility. The text argues that Italian culture needs to be considered in a transnational/transcultural perspective and that an understanding of linguistic and cultural translation underlies all approaches to the study of Italian culture in a global context. Contributions deploy a range of methodological approaches to understand and illustrate how language operates, how culture inhabits and constitutes public and private space, how notions of time operate within people’s lives, and the multiple ways in which people experience a sense of personhood. Chapters stretch from the medieval period to the present and demonstrate how transnational Italian culture can be critically addressed through the examination of carefully chosen examples. Contributors: Alessandra Diazzi, Andrea Rizzi, Barbara Spadaro, Charles Burdett, Clorinda Donato, David Bowe, Derek Duncan, Donna Gabaccia, Eugenia Paulicelli, Fabio Camilletti, Giuliana Muscio, Jennifer Burns, Loredana Polezzi, Marco Santello, Monica Jansen, Naomi Wells, Nathalie Hester, Serena Bassi, Stefania Tufi, Teresa Fiore and Tristan Kay.

Reviews are an important aspect of scholarly discussion because they help filter out which works are relevant in the yearly flood of publications and are thus influential in determining how a work is received. The IBR, published again since 1971 as an interdisciplinary, international bibliography of reviews, it is a unique source of bibliographical information. The database contains entries on over 1.2 million book reviews of literature dealing primarily with the humanities and social sciences published in 6,820, mainly European scholarly journals. Reviews of more than 560,000 scholarly works are listed. The database increases every year by 60,000 entries. Every entry contains the following information: On the work reviewed: author, title On the review: reviewer, periodical (year, edition, page, ISSN), language, subject area (in German, English, Italian) Publisher, address of journal