This book is divided into three sections. The first section deals with the general situation of Italian/American literature and its reception both in the United States and in Italy. It also discusses other social and cultural issues that pertain to Italian Americana. Section two consists of six chapters, each discussing a specific author; three dedicated to prose (Pietro di Donato, Mario Puzo, Luigi Barzini), three dedicated to poetry (Joseph Tusiani, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Rina Ferrarelli). Section three examines the current state of criticism dedicated to Italian/American literature, the second part focusing in on a number of specific works.

Celebrating one of the most important Italian American female authors of our time, Personal Effects offers a lucid view of Louise DeSalvo as a writer who has produced a vast and provocative body of memoir writing, a scholar who has enriched our understanding of Virginia Woolf, and a teacher who has transformed countless lives. More than an anthology, Personal Effects represents an author case study and an example for modern Italian American interdisciplinary scholarship. Personal Effects examines DeSalvo’s memoirs as works that push the boundaries of the most controversial genre of the past few decades. In these works, the author fearlessly explores issues such as immigration, domesticity, war, adultery, illness, mental health, sexuality, the environment, and trauma through the lens of gender, ethnic, and working-class identity. Alongside her groundbreaking scholarship, DeSalvo’s memoirs attest to the power and influence of this feminist Italian American writer.

The Routledge History of Italian Americans weaves a narrative of the trials and triumphs of one of the nation’s largest ethnic groups. This history, comprising original essays by leading scholars and critics, addresses themes that include the Columbian legacy, immigration, the labor movement, discrimination, anarchism, Fascism, World War II patriotism, assimilation, gender identity and popular culture. This landmark volume offers a clear and accessible overview of work in the growing academic field of Italian American Studies. Rich illustrations bring the story to life, drawing out the aspects of Italian American history and culture that make this ethnic group essential to the American experience.

This study examines the necessity of reading retrospectively. In this manner, the reader who comes along after the composition of an author's opus may better understand the author's earlier works after reading a later one. In contrast to a reader contemporary to the text, who does not have the opportunity of 'hind-sight, ' this special reader (recto-lector) draws on information gathered from a later text in order to understand a previously composed text. For example, the relationship between Aldo Palazzeschi's: riflessi (1908) and his later manifestoes (1914-1915) amply demonstrates the value and necessity of such a reading process: this is especially true with regard to non-canonial writers as is Palazzeschi. The retro-lector of: riflessi, therefore, comes away with an interpretation both different and more complete than that which the contemporary reader would acquire after a strict canonical reading. Along with works by Palazzeschi, 'Semiotics of Re-reading' also examines poetry by Guido Gozzano and short fiction by Italo Calvino

Italian Americans on Screen: Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future reconsiders Robert Casillo’s definition of Italian-American cinema as “appl[ying] to works by Italian-American directors who treat Italian-American subjects” to expand this classification. Contributors situate Italian-American cinema and media within the contemporary and intersectional debates about ethnic identity, including race, class, gender, and sexuality studies. This book links past scholarship to theoretical underpinnings with new hermeneutical approaches in television and film to establish new interpretations concerning Italian Americans on screen. Scholars of film studies, media studies, cultural studies, and sociology will find this book particularly useful.

During World War II 51,000 Italian prisoners of war were detained in the United States. When Italy signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943, most of these soldiers agreed to swear allegiance to the United States and to collaborate in the fight against Germany. At the Letterkenny Army Depot, located near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, more than 1,200 Italian soldiers were detained as co-operators. They arrived in May 1944 to form the 321st Italian Quartermaster Battalion and remained until October 1945. As detainees, the soldiers helped to order, stock, repair, and ship military goods, munitions and equipment to the Pacific and European Theaters of war. Through such labor, they lent their collective energy to the massive home front endeavor to defeat the Axis Powers. The prisoners also helped to construct the depot itself, building roads, sidewalks, and fences, along with individual buildings such as an assembly hall, amphitheater, swimming pool, and a chapel and bell tower. The latter of these two constructions still exist, and together with the assembly hall, bear eloquent testimony to the Italian POW experience. For their work the Italian co-operators received a very modest, regular salary, and they experienced more freedom than regular POWs. In their spare time, they often had liberty to leave the post in groups that American soldiers chaperoned. Additionally, they frequently received or visited large entourages of Italian Americans from the Mid-Atlantic region who were eager to comfort their erstwhile countrymen. The story of these Italian soldiers detained at Letterkenny has never before been told. Now, however, oral histories from surviving POWs, memoirs generously donated by family members of ex-prisoners, and the rich information newly available from archival material in Italy, aided by material found in the U.S., have made it possible to reconstruct this experience in full. All of this historical documentation has also allowed the authors to tell fascinating individual stories from the moment when many POWs were captured to their return to Italy and beyond. More than seventy years since the end of World War II, family members of ex-POWs in both the United States and Italy still enjoy the positive legacy of this encounter.

The book focuses on literary representations of the northern Italian region of Liguria, whose landscape has been portrayed by internationally-known Italian poets and novelists, from Eugenio Montale to Italo Calvino. The author argues that the most perceptive authors situate themselves on a metaphorical ridge dividing the “dark side” of Mediterranean landscape, with its harsh and mountainous territory, from the sun-drenched Riviera, celebrated by the tourist industry and for the most part destroyed during the so-called economic boom. The complex and often antithetical concepts of landscape examined in the introduction inform the author’s readings of those modern and contemporary writers who have tried to make sense of the ambivalences present in Ligurian landscape, from the period of Italian Risorgimento to the present.

This book highlights the centrality of the autobiographical enterprise to Italian women’s writing through the twentieth century—a century that has frequently been referred to as the century of the self. Ursula Fanning addresses the thorny issue of essentialism potentially involved in underlining links between women’s writing and autobiographical modes, and ultimately rejects it in favor of an argument based on the cultural, linguistic, and literary marginalization of women writers within the Italian context. It is concerned with Italian women writers’ various ways of grappling with constructions of subjectivity throughout the century and sets out to explore them. Fanning reads autobiographical writing as subject to many of the same constraints as fiction and, in doing so, draws attention to the significance of the recurring use of the terms “pure” and “impure” in many critical and theoretical discussions of the autobiographical (where “pure” is used to suggest a truthful representation of a life, while “impure” suggests the messy undertaking of mixing lived experience with fiction). Recurring patterns and paradigms are found in the works of the various writers considered (eighteen in all), and these paradigms are analyzed through close readings of their works. These close readings offer insights into approaches to the constructions of subjectivity in the narratives and are informed by feminist theories. The chapters focus on selves in relationship, taking their lead from the patterns unfolding in the writers’ work, hence the subjects are constructed as daughters (with different views of the self in relation to fathers and mothers), within the confines of the romantic relationship (which involves reconsiderations and rewritings of the romance plot), as maternal subjects, and as writers (with an eye on their relationship to the literary canon, as well as to the relationship with readers). This book argues that there is such a thing as gendered subjectivity and that its constructions may be traced through the texts analyzed.

Dacia Maraini’s Narratives of Survival: (Re)Constructed focuses on Dacia Maraini’s narrative from about 1984 to 2004 and makes substantive use of her interviews and essays. While acknowledging the importance and ongoing validity of feminist scholarship of Maraini’s work, this book seeks to take scholarship on Maraini beyond feminist readings by identifying a critical framework that cuts across gender and genre and thereby invites alternative readings. Using a method of close textual analysis, the author includes studies of men, children, animals, and imaginary characters in Maraini’s narrative, analyzes language, character, motifs, and symbols, and considers some of Maraini’s work in light of declining postmodern and emerging posthuman critical social theory. This critical framework identifies the paradigm of reconstruction as narrative center, both strategy and theme, of many of Maraini’s works from this twenty-year-period and beyond. Reconstruction here signifies the strategies by which Maraini’s deep investment in survival, which has its roots in the life threatening conditions she experienced as a small child in a WWII Japanese concentration camp, is enacted in a narrative re-building and re-constructing of personal memory, of various personal, social and political histories, of motherhood and maternal discourses, of crime stories, of postmodern fragmentation, and even of the process of erasure itself. Maraini’s narrative is deeply attentive to the mechanisms that threaten survival of the body (and not just the woman’s body); psychological and aesthetic survival; the survival in the Italian canon of a woman author’s work, memory and legacy after her death; the survival of a drug-addicted and self-destructive younger generation; and by extension, collective and ecological survival. Never marked by nihilism or despair, Maraini’s narratives offer the ethos of reconstruction as a variation on the “begin again” that marks the end of many of her novels and, as we can see in Colomba, her own aesthetic process of renewal and regeneration. This book focuses primarily on Il treno per Helsinki (1984), Isolina (1985), some of her short stories for children, La nave per Kobe: Diari giapponesi di mia madre (2001), Buio (Strega Literary Prize, 1999), and Colomba (2004).

Italian Women at War: Sisters in Arms from Unification to the Twentieth Century offers diverse perspectives on Italian women’s participation in war and conflict throughout Italy’s modern history, contributing to the ongoing scholarly conversation on this topic. Part one of the book focuses on heroines who fought for Italy’s Unification and on the anti-heroines, or brigantesse, who opposed such a momentous change. Part two considers exceptional individuals, such as Eva Kühn Amendola, who combatted both with her body and her pen, as well as collective female efforts during the world wars, whether military or civilian. In part three, where the context is twentieth-century society, the focus shifts to those women engaged in less conventional conflicts who resorted to different forms of revolt, including active non-violence. All of the women presented across these chapters engage in combat to protest a particular state of affairs and effect change, yet their weapons range from the literal, like Peppa La Cannoniera’s cannon, to the metaphorical, like Letizia Battaglia’s camera. Several of the essays in this volume discuss fictional heroines who appear in works of literature and film, though all are based on actual women and reference real historical contexts. Italian Women at War furthers the efforts begun decades ago to recognize Italian women combatants, especially in light of the recent anniversary of the Unification in 2011 and global discussions regarding the role of women in the military. Its aim is not to glorify violence and war, but to celebrate the active role of Italian women in the evolution of their nation and to demystify the idea of the woman warrior, who has always been viewed either as an extraordinary, almost mythical creature or as an affront to the traditional feminine identity.