Voices of Italian America
Subtitle: a history of early  Italian American literature with a critical anthology
By: Martino Marazzi ; translated by Ann Goldstein.
Contributors: Goldstein, Ann, 1949-; Marazzi, Martino, 1963-
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Madison
Language: eng
Number of pages: 343
Subjects: Italian American literature -- History and criticism; Italian literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism; American literature -- Italian American authors -- History and criticism; Italians -- United States -- Intellectual life; Italian Americans -- Intellectual life; Italian-Americans in literature; United States -- In literature
Description: "This book presents for the first time in English a substantial choice of texts (excerpts from novels, short stories, memoirs, and poems), 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 - immigration, labor conditions, family ties, the lure and snares of the big city, its multiethnicity."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 322-336) and index.
Parts of this volume are the translation, with a few minor additions and corrections, of the author's Misteri di Little Italy. Milano : F. Angeli, 2001.