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.
Содержание
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Changing Culture
1. A Hard Rome’s A-Gonna Fall: Roman Sonnets, Sicilian Sulfur, and American Ballads
2. Changing Culture: European Immigrants and New York City Literature, 1870–1940
3. ‘Our brother Dante’: Dantesque Reappropriations in Italian America
Part II: Transitional Modes of Italian American Letters
4. All the Words That Are (Not) Fit to Print: Notes on the ‘Illiterature’ of the Italian Emigration
5. Questioning the Traditionalism of Italian American Literature
6. Kings of Harlem: Garibaldi Lapolla and the ‘Grand’ Gennaro
7. I Am(s): Strategies of Acceptance and Denial
8. Reading Robert Viscusi
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Об авторе
Martino Marazzi is Associate Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Milan in Italy. His many books include
Voices of Italian America: A History of Early Italian American Literature with a Critical Anthology.