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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.

The Mirage of America in Contemporary Italian Literature and Film explores the use of images associated with the United States in Italian novels and films released between the 1980s and the 2000s. In this study, Barbara Alfano looks at the ways in which the individuals portrayed in these works – and the intellectuals who created them – confront the cultural construct of the American myth. As Alfano demonstrates, this myth is an integral part of Italians’ discourse to define themselves culturally – in essence, Italian intellectuals talk about America often for the purpose of talking about Italy. The book draws attention to the importance of Italian literature and film as explorations of an individual’s ethics, and to how these productions allow for functioning across cultures. It thus differentiates itself from other studies on the subject that aim at establishing the relevance and influence of American culture on Italian twentieth-century artistic representations.

Winner of the 2006 Pietro Di Donato and John Fante Literary Award from The Grand Lodge of the Sons of Italy, New York State Robert Viscusi takes a comprehensive look at Italian American writing by exploring the connections between language and culture in Italian American experience and major literary texts. Italian immigrants, Viscusi argues, considered even their English to be a dialect of Italian, and therefore attempted to create an American English fully reflective of their historical, social, and cultural positions. This approach allows us to see Italian American purposes as profoundly situated in relation not only to American language and culture but also to Italian nationalist narratives in literary history as well as linguistic practice. Viscusi also situates Italian American writing within the \"eccentric design\" of American literature, and uses a multidisciplinary approach to read not only novels and poems, but also houses, maps, processions, videos, and other artifacts as texts.

A Circular Journey collects for the first time in one book the essays that most powerfully define the unique gifts of one of America's most distinctive voices. These fifteen pieces, tracking some thirty years of a writer's life, come together to illuminate the stages and themes and places that mark Helen Barolini's art. Divided into three closely linked sections-Home,Abroad,Return,-the essays move through Barolini's worlds. Her love of literature began when, as a child growing up as an avid reader in Syracuse, New York, she was presented with a diary and told to write in it. Returning to the heritage of her Italian immigrant grandparents, she moved to Italy as a young writer. There she lived for many years, becoming acquainted with the brightest of Italy's literary lights. The accomplished poet, novelist, and critic she became now lives at home in two nurturing cultures, America and Italy both.The essays are memoirs of her house on a street named for Henry James's grandfather, tales of literary journeys from Taos to Taormina, and Paris to Rome, as the young bride of a poet from the Veneto and, later on, as a distinguished writer whose explorations of identity and dislocation took her back to Italian inspirations.From a delightful account of a writing fellowship in an exquisite villa overlooking the Italian lakes to her first trip back to discover distant family roots in the hills of Calabria, Barolini moves lyrically through the generations of her life, giving form to the influences that shaped her art and her sense of self-as an American, a woman, and a gifted daughter of the two cultures she has so powerfully imagined.Praise for Helen BaroliniAn impassioned and magnificent contribution to our knowledge of what it has meant and means still to be an ethnic American and woman . . . . a book of heroic recovery and affirmation.-Alice Walker (on The Dream Book)Large in scope, in depth, and in the gift of narrative.-Cynthia Ozick (on Umbertina)

Our lives are Swiss,Emily Dickinson wrote in 1859, So still-so cool.But over the Alps, Italy stands the other side.For Dickinson, as for many other writers and artists, Italy has been the land of light, a seductive source of invention, enchantment, and freedom. So it was for Helen Barolini, who, as a student in Rome after World War II, wrote her first poetry and gave birth to her own creative life, reinvigorating her mother tongue. In this book, Barolini celebrates the lives of other women whose imaginations succumbed to the lure of Italy.Here Barolini profiles six gifted women transformed by Italy's mythic appeal. Unlike Barolini herself, they were not daughters of the great Italian diaspora. Rather, they were drawn to an idea of Italyand its gifts-in whose welcome a new self could be created. Or discovered.Emily Dickinson traveled to Italy only in the imaginative genius of her verse. Margaret Fuller struggled alongside her Italian lover in the political revolutions that gave birth to the Italian Republic, while the novelist and short-story writer Constance Fennimore Woolson found her home in Venice and Florence. Here, too, is the flamboyant artist Mabel Dodge Luhan, entertaining at her villa near Florence; and Marguerite Chapin of Connecticut, who married an Italian prince and in Rome founded the premier literary review of the mid-century, Botteghe Oscure. Finally, here is Iris Cutting Origo, the Anglo-American heiress who, with her Italian nobleman husband, built a Tuscan estate, where she wrote acclaimed biographies-and created a refuge from Mussolini's fascism.Linking these lives, Barolini shows, is the transforming catalyst of change in a new land. Their Other Side is a wise, warm, and deeply felt literary journey that brilliantly captures the enduring effects of Italy as a place, a culture, and an experience.

Featuring essays by twelve prominent American literature scholars,Roman Holidaysexplores the tradition of American travel to Italy and makes a significant contribution to the understanding of nineteenth-century American encounters with Italian culture and, more specifically, with Rome. The increase in American travel to Italy during the nineteenth century was partly a product of improved conditions of travel. As suggested in the title, Italy served nineteenth-century writers and artists as a kind of laboratory site for encountering Others and \"other\" kinds of experience. No doubt Italy offered a place of holiday-a momentary escape from the familiar-but the journey to Rome, a place urging upon the visitor a new and more complex sense of history, also forced a reexamination of oneself and one's identity. Writers and artists found their religious, political, and sexual assumptions challenged. Nathaniel Hawthorne'sThe Marble Faunhas a prominent place in this collection: as Henry James commented in his study of Hawthorne, the book was \"part of the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon visitor to Rome.\" The essayists also examine works by James, Fuller, Melville, Douglass, Howells, and other writers as well as such sculptors as Hiram Powers, William Wetmore Story, and Harriet Hosmer. Bringing contemporary concerns about gender, race, and class to bear upon nineteenth-century texts,Roman Holidaysis an especially timely contribution to nineteenth-century American studies.

This essay investigates the role of Divagando, an Italian-language magazine published in New York City from 1943 to 1963, in shaping modern Italian American identities. Amid post-war transnational cultural exchanges, Divagando's blend of literary contributions, advertisements, and cultural commentary positioned it as a mediator between Italy and the United States for Italian-speaking Americans, simultaneously reinforcing and challenging prevailing cultural tropes. Special attention is given to Andre Luotto, the advertiser and founding editor whose vision was instrumental to the magazine's success. Using a methodological approach that combines Social Network Analysis and microhistory, the essay ultimately argues for the value of both distant and close readings of literary infrastructures to identify new transfers and patterns of influence.

Originating in the works of early twentieth-century authors such as H. P. Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood, weird fiction is experiencing a renaissance in contemporary literature. Several scholars have presented this literary mode as uniquely suited to speak to the anxieties generated by the current ecological crisis. In this essay, we examine Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts (2019) as part of a wave of recent works that mark a sharp departure from the immersive strategies with which weird fiction is typically associated. We argue that this encounter between the weird and the \"meta\" is particularly effective in bringing out the strange entanglement of human societies and the nonhuman world in times of climate crisis, serving as a powerful model for future iterations of the weird.

This study explores student perceptions of asynchronous language learning in the context of a private college's shift from exclusively face‐to‐face (F2F) instruction to blended learning. The new model, internally known as “4 + 1,” combines four F2F sessions with one asynchronous session per week. The data analyzed herein were gathered through an anonymous survey completed by 767 students enrolled in at least one of 12 language programs: Arabic, American Sign Language, German, Hebrew, Italian, Chinese, Modern Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, Vietnamese, and Yoruba. The findings reveal that most students enthusiastically favor incorporating asynchronous components in their F2F classes, citing benefits such as increased flexibility, autonomy, reduced stress, and enhanced opportunities for deeper content learning. Despite these strengths, some challenges were identified as well, including inconsistent workloads and coordination difficulties during group projects. Participants' overall positive assessment of the new model underscores its potential to improve learners' language abilities, motivation, and engagement. As educational institutions continue to explore blended environments, this study provides valuable insights into best practices for fostering flexible and effective language instruction.

At least one of Anne Bradstreet's contemporaries thought of her as a writer of sonnets, and several of her extant poems play with the conventions of Petrarchan verse. Although Bradstreet embraced Petrarchism as a poetic language, she objected to the ways in which male poets used the sonnet to objectify and silence women; her experiments in the form legitimize the desires, bodily presence, and subjectivity of women. Her experience of sexual harassment and linguistic violence at the hand of male gatekeepers in the arts led Bradstreet to propose an alternative model for poetic prowess and recognition, a model that eschews the sexual violence construed by her contemporaries as an honor.