Traveling Italy, Writing America: Ethnic Identity Construction in Italian American Literature (Critical Studies in Italian Migrations)

Illuminates why Italy continues to captivate the American imagination, connecting classic literature to contemporary memoirs and popular media that still view Italy as a site of transformation, desire, and reflectionTraveling Italy, Writing America argues that the American idea of Italy, at once sunny and dark, refined and excessive, has played a crucial role in shaping both U.S. national identity and Italian American literary self-fashioning.The book shows how this idea was forged in nineteenth-century American travel writing and later reimagined by early Italian American authors as a means of claiming cultural legitimacy within the United States. Beginning with Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James, the study demonstrates how Italy became a stage on which Americans rehearsed questions of taste, class, and national identity.It then turns to Antonio Arrighi, Pascal D’Angelo, and Giuseppe Cautela, showing how these writers appropriated f