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An examination of Italian immigrants and their children in the early twentieth century, A New Language, A New World is the first full-length historical case study of one immigrant group's experience with language in America. Incorporating the interdisciplinary literature on language within a historical framework, Nancy C. Carnevale illustrates the complexity of the topic of language in American immigrant life. By looking at language from the perspectives of both immigrants and the dominant culture as well as their interaction, this book reveals the role of language in the formation of ethnic identity and the often coercive context within which immigrants must negotiate this process. _x000B__x000B_Carnevale provides the context for understanding the linguistic history of Italian Americans by presenting a brief overview of the politics of language in Italy, with its racialized split between North and South, multiple dialects, and class divisions. During the Age of Migration, Italian immigrants encountered a similarly contested linguistic terrain in America, where immigrant languages in general were devalued and knowledge of the English language served as a criterion for full membership in a racially constructed society._x000B__x000B_Exploring a range of issues faced by Italians once they reached the United States, Carnevale considers the immigrant perspective on translation in both a literal linguistic sense and a figurative translation of self-identity. Italian Americans found a familiar voice in the popular entertainer Farfariello, whose comic songs incorporating the Italo-American idiom expressed problems of immigrant life as problems of communication--often between the sexes--suggesting the centrality of language in the immigrant imagination. And with the rise of fascism in the Italian homeland, the Italian language took on even more conflicted meanings in America as Italian Americans were regarded with suspicion and scrutiny._x000B__x000B_Grounded in a diverse array of archival sources, this study deepens our understanding of linguistic transformations in America and what they mean for ethnic identity and the process of assimilation. The story of Italians living with a new language in a new world forms only one piece of America's larger linguistic history, a history that has been integral to American conceptions of nation, race, and ethnicity.

Integrating history, literary criticism, and cultural studies, Imagining Italians vividly tells the story of two voyages across the Atlantic: America’s cultural pilgrimage to Italy and the Italian “racial odyssey” in America. It examines how American representations of Italy, Italians, and Italian Americans engaged with national debates over immigration, race, and national identity during the period 1880–1910. Joseph P. Cosco offers a close analysis of selected works by immigrant journalists Jacob Riis and Edward Steiner and American iconographic writers Henry James and Mark Twain. Exploring their Italian depictions in journalism, photos, travel narratives, and fiction, he rediscovers the forgotten Edward Steiner and offers fresh readings of Riis’s reform efforts and photography, James’s The Golden Bowl and The American Scene, and Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson.

Presenting a nuanced story of women, migration, community, industry, and civic life at the turn of the twentieth century, Carol Lynn McKibben's Beyond Cannery Row analyzes the processes of migration and settlement of Sicilian fishers from three villages in Western Sicily to Monterey, California--and sometimes back again. _x000B_McKibben's analysis of gender and gender roles shows that it was the women in this community who had the insight, the power, and the purpose to respond and even prosper amid changing economic conditions. Vividly evoking the immigrants' everyday experiences through first-person accounts and detailed description, McKibben demonstrates that the cannery work done by Sicilian immigrant women was crucial in terms of the identity formation and community development. These changes allowed their families to survive the challenges of political conflicts over citizenship in World War II and intermarriage with outsiders throughout the migration experience. The women formed voluntary associations and celebrated festas that effectively linked them with each other and with their home villages in Sicily. Continuous migration created a strong sense of transnationalism among Sicilians in Monterey, which has enabled them to continue as a viable ethnic community today. _x000B_

This book reviews the period from the unification of Italy to the fascist era through significant Neapolitan performers such as Gilda Mignonette and Enrico Caruso. It traces the transformation of a popular tradition written in dialect into a popular tradition, written in Italian, that contributed to the production of \"American\" identity.

Integrating history, literary criticism, and cultural studies, Imagining Italians vividly tells the story of two voyages across the Atlantic: America's cultural pilgrimage to Italy and the Italian \"racial odyssey\" in America. It examines how American representations of Italy, Italians, and Italian Americans engaged with national debates over immigration, race, and national identity during the period 1880–1910. Joseph P. Cosco offers a close analysis of selected works by immigrant journalists Jacob Riis and Edward Steiner and American iconographic writers Henry James and Mark Twain. Exploring their Italian depictions in journalism, photos, travel narratives, and fiction, he rediscovers the forgotten Edward Steiner and offers fresh readings of Riis's reform efforts and photography, James's The Golden Bowl and The American Scene, and Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson.

The Women's Movement is usually referred to as if it were a constant, global phenomenon. There are women's movements in Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, India, Japan and Australia, and many women and men assume that they are regional manifestations of the same thing, and share a common core. Susan Bassnett has lived and been involved in the struggles of the women's movement in the United States, Italy and the United Kingdom, and has had extensive contacts with feminists in the German Democratic Republic. On the basis of her personal experiences and study of women's history and literature in these countries she is able to present a striking picture of the variety of feminist aims, tactics and priorities in the four countries, and of the character of the women's movement in four very different cultures. In Italy, she focuses on the violence of the women's movement - its intellectualism and energy. In analysing the American women's movement she dwells on its roots in the past, and its faith in pragmatic solutions. The GDR presents completely different questions, hinging on the relationship between state socialism and feminism. In the UK, Susan Bassnett finds herself returning to that all-pervasive aspect of British life - class, and its importance for feminists. Throughout, the author writes with a double commitment: first, to furthering our understanding of the diversity of aims of women's movements and their common ground - the no-man's land of female existence; second, to making her book as accessible as possible to all feminists, through drawing on her own personal experience of countries in which she has lived, worked, travelled, and made friends.

In this essay the communication practices of labor migrants and their evolution from nineteenth-century print media to late twentieth-century electronic media provide the frame for a discussion of the limitations of national approaches to collection and interpretation. Multiple languages and knowledge of cultures of origin are required, cooperative library and research projects are necessary. On the basis of the Labor Newspaper Preservation Project it is argued that analysis of the bibliographic data by themselves, without going into the contents of the newspapers, revises current assumptions about processes of migration, acculturation, and internationalist class positions. The classic North American immigrant labor press came to an end in the 1970s. New patterns, feminization of migration and mobility to domestic and caregiving work, and new patterns of communication led to an ascendancy of electronic publications. Electronic publications and global rather than hemispheric migration will require different collecting strategies. These, like their printed predecessors, provide a perspective on migrants that differs from ethnicity and state-side approaches. Human rights rather than class struggles and migrant remittances rather the denationalization are the themes, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) rather than labor organizations are the publishers.

In this well documented work,2 Italian foregrounds and backgrounds come to life in a rich intermingling of art, architecture, music, literature, theater, geography and history. [...]the novel explores in depth the social tensions and intellectual conflicts of the period, in particular, as Cynthia Griffin Wolff has pointed out, the conflict between progressivism and traditionalism.3 In fact, as Wharton admitted in a letter, \"there is too much explanation, too much history,\" because \"the period (in Italy) is one so unfamiliar to the reader that it was difficult to take for granted that he would fill out his background for himself.\" \"8 The description is indeed very close to the one in the essay, but richer in detail and effects. [...]the procession and religious ceremony, as well as the more secular aspects of the celebrations, introduce the crowd as a very important and recurrent aspect of the novel, as one of the backgrounds that animate the whole picture.9 Opera isn't usually given much space in the typical tourist guidebook, but is a place of popular art, only partially enriched by Juvara's facade and marble portico. The result would have been very composite and eclectic. [...]Wharton tells us that famous painters were involved in the decoration - \"Correggio painted the walls of one room, Giulio Romano the ceiling of another\" - while the portrait gallery hosts a long line of faces, from a Piero della Francesca's portrait of the first Duke to a bishop painted by Caravaggio. [...]in her notebook, now at the Beinecke Library, she lists a considerable number of books to consult in preparing for the actual writing of the novel (See Eleanor Dwight, The Influence of Italy on Edith Wharton, Ph.D.