Voices of Italian America: A History of Early Italian American Literature With a Critical Anthology

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. CD4 - A hardcover book in good condition in very good dust jacket that is mylar protected. Dust jacket has some wrinkling, chipping and crease on the edges and corners, some scattered light scratches, rubbing and scuffing, light tanning and shelf wear. Book has some bumped corners and dents, wrinkling on the spine edges, some scattered underlining and brackets, dog-eared page, light tanning and shelf wear. Translated by Ann Goldstein. 9.5"x6.5", 343 pages. Satisfaction Guaranteed. An unprecedented exodus that brought millions of Italians to the New World, the Great Migration has been studied until now mainly in its historical, social, and ethnographical dimensions. Scholars of literature, on the contrary, have neglected this field, despite the rich and varied literary fabric to be found in the teeming Little Italies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What is presented here is thus the first detailed history of that forgotten territory. This book presents also for the first time in English a substantial choice of texts (excerpts from novels, short stories, memoirs, and poems), mostly written in Italian by first-generation immigrants. Marazzi, a specialist in Italo-American cultural relations, introduces here the lives and works of a number of novelists, poets, activists, and journalists, who wrote for the myriad of newspapers published all around the country. There are authors of serialized novels (the "mysteries" of downtown Manhattan), N.Y.P.D. cops, and nationalists extolling the virtues of the Duce, as well as red anarchists, ladies, and "flappers" from the Italian American middle class, and proletarian rhetoricians. Their personal stories testify to a wider collective novel focused around the myth and the dream of "making America." Through their pages and their critical presentation, the reader is brought to discover the literary dignity of this production, clearly linked to the popular roots of nineteenth-century Italian culture, but at the same time confronted with the traumas and the different realities of a new society. The main themes are voiced with characteristic intensity - immigration, labor conditions, family ties, the lure and snares of the big city, its multiethnicity. Over a period of more than half a century, we witness the rise and demise of an Italian-speaking literature in the United States, which will then lead the way to the new generation, most notably represented by John Fante and Pietro di Donato. On the whole, Voices of Italian America gives the reader a key to the understanding of a full-pledged civilization, still underappreciated in the United States and ignored in Italy by the elitism of the literary milieu.. Hardcover. Good/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.