Italian American Poetics of Place : An Environmental Perspective

This volume examines the significance of place in contemporary Italian American literature from an ecocritical perspective.It fills a gap in the theoretical/critical 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 author 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.Contesting the prejudice that sees Italian American culture as distant from ecological concerns, the works examined 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 b