Author: Edvige Giunta
Publisher: Modern Language Association of America
ISBN: 9781603290661
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Italian American studies has long been in conversation with American culture at large and is increasingly present in American universities and colleges. Yet once-celebrated works, such as Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete, have slipped from the public consciousness, and many scholars fear that representations of Italian Americans in popular culture, as in The Godfather films and the television series The Sopranos, have obscured genuine historical inquiry and understanding. This volume aims to foster a deeper and more complex appreciation for the importance of Italian American texts in the study of American culture.The editors open the volume by outlining the history of Italians in the United States and exploring the potential of literature and the arts to enable the recovery of a forgotten, even repressed, historical past. Over thirty scholars and teachers then present innovative ways of teaching Italian American texts and integrating them with other texts in courses ranging from American literature and history to multiethnic and women's studies. Contributors discuss Italian American fiction, poetry, memoir, oral history, and theater and performance. A section on film and television provides an overview of popular as well as lesser-known works and interrogates the stereotyped portrayals of Italian Americans. Other contributors offer historical and interdisciplinary approaches to Italian American texts that revolve around themes of race and gender politics, work and social class, and historical intersections. The volume concludes with a review of anthologies that can be used in teaching Italian American studies.
Author: Eric Martone
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 792
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Book Description
The entire Italian American experience—from America's earliest days through the present—is now available in a single volume. This wide-ranging work relates the entire saga of the Italian-American experience from immigration through assimilation to achievement. The book highlights the enormous contributions that Italian Americans—the fourth largest European ethnic group in the United States—have made to the professions, politics, academy, arts, and popular culture of America. Going beyond familiar names and stories, it also captures the essence of everyday life for Italian Americans as they established communities and interacted with other ethnic groups. In this single volume, readers will be able to explore why Italians came to America, where they settled, and how their distinctive identity was formed. A diverse array of entries that highlight the breadth of this experience, as well as the multitude of ways in which Italian Americans have influenced U.S. history and culture, are presented in five thematic sections. Featured primary documents range from a 1493 letter from Christopher Columbus announcing his discovery to excerpts from President Barack Obama's 2011 speech to the National Italian American Foundation. Readers will come away from this book with a broader understanding of and greater appreciation for Italian Americans' contributions to the United States.
Author: Daniele Fioretti
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303147211X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Author: Chiara Mazzucchelli
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438459238
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Makes the case for a distinctly Sicilian American literature. In The Heart and the Island, Chiara Mazzucchelli explores the strong bond between Sicilian American writers and the island of Sicily. Self-contained yet connected to the mainland, geographically separated from yet politically united to the rest of Italy, Sicily occupies a unique position. Throughout the twentieth century, the sense of a distinct sicilianitàor Siciliannesshas manifested itself in a corpus of texts that, although subsumed under the broader context of Italian literature, have distinguished themselves as examples of an exquisitely Sicilian literary experience. Mazzucchelli argues that a parallel phenomenonsicilianamericanitàhas emerged in the United States. Focusing on the islands geography, history, and culture, she examines how many American authors of Sicilian descent derive inspiration from their ethnic milieu and lay out a recognizable set of Sicilian culture markers in their works, thereby producing a literature that is distinctly Sicilian American. Drawing on both Italian and Italian American scholarship, The Heart and the Island is the first full-length study of Sicilian American literature, and it opens a space for new interdisciplinary discussions on what it means to be Italian on both sides of the ocean. The Heart and the Island makes a distinctive contribution to the field of Italian American studies, provocatively extending it as well as continuing the invaluable work of providing reflection on a variety of narratives distinguished by generic innovation and distinctive responses to sicilianità. Chiara Mazzucchelli has beautifully advanced the field, interweaving with skill and poise the voices of Sicilian and Sicilian American writers. Mary Jo Bona, author of By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America
Author: Sabrina Vellucci
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683934334
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199
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Book Description
This volume examines the significance of place in contemporary Italian American literature from an ecocritical perspective. It fills a gap in the theoretical discourse on Italian American culture, whose concerns about environmental justice have been mostly overlooked. From mid-twentieth-century poets such as John Ciardi and Diane di Prima to late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction writers such as Carole Maso and Salvatore Scibona, the study combines Italian American literary criticism with the spatial turn that, over the last decades, has asserted the interpretive significance of place and the environment in literary texts. Questioning the prejudice that sees Italian American culture as detached from ecological issues, these works show that such diasporic heritage has helped forge different modes of relationship and new forms of expression in contact with the “American” land. Their relevance lies not so much in defining or redefining Italian American ethnicity but in forging ideas and futures beyond their immediate framework and subject matter. By focusing on the intersection of gender and ethnicity with local and transnational spaces and aesthetic practices, Italian American Poetics of Place contributes to the growing field of inquiry that explores the resources of the literary in laying the basis for more dialogic and inclusive forms of awareness and community with both the human and other-than-human.
Author: Graziella Parati
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611470382
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
The Cultures of Italian Migration allows the adjective "Italian" to qualify people's movements along diverse trajectories and temporal dimensions. Discussions on migrations to and from Italy meet in that discursive space where critical concepts like"home," "identity," "subjectivity," and "otherness" eschew stereotyping. This volume demonstrates that interpretations of old migrations are necessary in order to talk about contemporary Italy. New migrations trace new non linear paths in the definitionof a multicultural Italy whose roots are unmistakably present throughout the centuries. Some of these essays concentrate on topics that are historically long-term, such as emigration from Italy to the Americas and southern Pacific Ocean. Others focus on the more contemporary phenomena of immigration to Italy from other parts of the world, including Africa. This collection ultimately offers an invitation to seek out new and different modes of analyzing the migratory act.
Author: Cammie M. Sublette
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 1557286914
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
"Funded in part by The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts"--Page 4 of cover.
Author: Nancy Grace
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1949979962
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
'[This] survey of the many little magazines carrying the Beat message is impressive in its coverage, drawing attention to the importance of their paratextual content in providing valuable socio-political context. [...] The collection contains a range of insightful close readings, astute contextualizing, and inventive lateral pedagogical thinking, charting the transformation of the Beat scene from its free-wheeling, self-help, heady revolutionary 1960’s days to its contemporary position as an increasingly respectable component of the curriculum. [...] The Beats: A Teaching Companion is successful on a number of levels; it is a noteworthy contribution to the ever expanding field of Beat studies and, more broadly, cultural studies; and it is a collection that at its best gives hope that in referring to its ideas the inspired teacher may still be able to enlarge the lives of their students.' John Shapcott, Keele University
Author: Martino Marazzi
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438488629
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
The constant dialogue between literary forms of the Old and the New World is the core concern of the essays in Through the Periscope, which examine these ever-changing historical, intellectual, and psychological landscapes through the lens of Italian American culture. Moving beyond Little Italy, the book widens the spectrum of "pure" immigrant studies. It analyzes the longue durée of the revolutionary energies of 1848, an arc that leads from Margaret Fuller to Bob Dylan via the Great Migration of European peoples and languages, as well as the merging of various immigrant voices in the "changing culture" of turn-of-the-century New York. It reclaims the importance of Dante for Italian American writers and follows the metamorphosis of a Romance language dense in masterworks and oral nuances through the multiple signs of a new "illiterature." Points of arrival are both the majestic proletarian novels of the 1930s and a contemporary poem like Robert Viscusi's Ellis Island. Martino Marazzi's volume underlines the richness of such an epic cultural transformation and its fundamental importance for a more thorough understanding of Euro-American relations.
Author: Edvige Giunta
Publisher: New Village Press
ISBN: 161332152X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
Candid and intimate accounts of the factory-worker tragedy that shaped American labor rights On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, New York. The top three floors housed the Triangle Waist Company, a factory where approximately 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women and girls, labored to produce fashionable cotton blouses, known as “waists.” The fire killed 146 workers in a mere 15 minutes but pierced the perpetual conscience of citizens everywhere. The Asch Building had been considered a modern fireproof structure, but inadequate fire safety regulations left the workers inside unprotected. The tragedy of the fire, and the resulting movements for change, were pivotal in shaping workers' rights and unions. A powerful collection of diverse voices, Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Fire brings together stories from writers, artists, activists, scholars, and family members of the Triangle workers. Nineteen contributors from across the globe speak of a singular event with remarkable impact. One hundred and eleven years after the tragic incident, Talking to the Girls articulates a story of contemporary global relevance and stands as an act of collective testimony: a written memorial to the Triangle victims.
