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  • Italian Contributions
  • Daniela Ciani Forza

Italian scholarship this year exhibits a wide array of research programs, which range from classic methods of investigation to more recent studies [End Page 491] on multicultural, multidisciplinary, and postcolonial issues. Poetry remains a major field of research, with renewed interest in formalist poetry. American decadentism, a topic which has not yet drawn much attention, assumes new importance.

a. Collections and Essays

Numerous collections characterize this year's scholarship by Italian Americanists, who approach literary as well as cultural topics from different theoretical perspectives and who often collaborate with scholars from other countries.

Andrea Mariani, Francesco Marroni, and Massimo Verzella are the editors of the collection Scritture femminili: Da Mary Wollstonecraft a Virginia Woolf (Rome: Aracne). As the title of the volume suggests, the essays focus on women writers and the challenging debates related to issues of gender. Michele Russo's "The Planter's Northern Bride (1854) di Caroline Lee Hentz: Allegoria edenica o messa in scena di denuncia?" (pp. 285-303) is an interesting analysis of the narrative strategies Hentz employed to represent American Southern society in the mid-19th century. Russo shows how the author, while apparently supporting the practice of slavery, so slyly seems to endorse life on the plantation that she implies disapproval of its ambiguous values. So strong is the emphasis on the slaves' obsequious complaisance that, Russo underlines, they seem to act as performers in a pantomime rather than represent true characters. Cristina Giorcelli's "Intermedialità e intertestualità in Willa Cather: The Professor's House" (pp. 343-66) is an articulate analysis of Cather's novel, and she discusses its literary references (to Anatole France in particular), the structural interplay of the author's ideological attachment to tradition, and the complexity of her narratological devices. Particularly perceptive is her examination of the interrelation between the plastic arts and writing in the architecture of the novel. The essay, moreover, underlines Cather's denunciation of America's decline toward consumerism, thus expounding the author's ideological contribution to social questions. Carlo Martinez, "Il local color di Mary Noailles Murfree" (pp. 367-88), analyzes Murfree's In the Tennessee Mountains, applying John Urry's theoretical approach to the representation of space as formulated in his well-known The Tourist Gaze. Moving from the concept of local color in the construction of American national identity, Martinez proceeds to a discussion on the dual interpretation Murfree's work has so far received. On the one hand, her descriptions of Appalachia were accepted as an attempt to draw readers' attention to the region; on the [End Page 492] other, her short stories, far from suggesting a reassuring and nostalgic image, helped to establish the otherness that Appalachia represented against the American national myth. Another relevant contribution is that of the American scholar John Paul Russo, who introduces new critical perspectives on Vernon Lee by analyzing her fascinating travel writings (" 'Mingled Love and Wonder': Vernon Lee on Travel and Leisure," pp. 313-31). Sylvia Plath is the topic of an essay by Alan Shelston. Avoiding the hackneyed criticism involving her biographical image, Shelton focuses his study on Plath's earlier work and its links to the American tradition of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson (" 'Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant': Concealment and Self-Revelation in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath," pp. 334-42).

Giorcelli this year also edits "Primitivismo Statunitense" (LAmer 29), a collection of five noteworthy essays on African American authors who were part of the Harlem Renaissance. Giorcelli contributes the essay "Nella Larsen: Between Primitivism and Expressionism" (pp. 79-107), in which she discusses the intellectual relationship between primitivism and expressionism and the impact of these movements on black American artists. In analyzing Larsen's Quicksand Giorcelli focuses her attention on the interplay between the primitivist way the protagonist looks at herself from an external point of view and the expressionist image she has in considering herself from within her own world: an exotic object of lust on the one hand, a grotesque figure on the other. Fabio Saglimbeni's "Far from (Nigger) Heaven: Carl Van Vechten e i limiti del primitivismo" (pp. 109-45) reassesses Van Vechten's significance. Now that...

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