Imagining Italians

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright Page

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pp. iii-iv

CONTENTS

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pp. vii-

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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pp. ix-

INTRODUCTION: Magnificently Miserable Italians and Their Wretched, Princely Italy

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pp. 1-20

A gloomy mist hung over New Orleans on the night of October 15, 1890, as David C. Hennessy, the popular police superintendent, walked home after a late-night snack of half a dozen oysters and a teetotaling glass of milk at Dominic Virget’s saloon. As Hennessy walked alone in the gloaming...

1. JACOB RIIS: IMMIGRANTS OLD AND NEW, AND THE MAKING OF AMERICANS

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pp. 21-60

In his chapter “The Italian in New York” in How the Other Half Lives, the journalist and pioneering photographer Jacob A. Riis begins by discussing the transformation of the Italian immigrant as he makes his way from the Old World to the New. Riis notes that Italians form a “picturesque, if not very...

2. EDWARD STEINER: ALL IS (NOT) RACE?

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pp. 61-86

At about the same time that Jacob Riis was becoming an elder statesman in the urban reform movement and Henry James was probing the immigrants’ coloring of the American scene, a lesser known academic/journalist was spending vacations trailing and documenting European migrants to...

3. HENRY JAMES’S PICTURESQUE PEASANTS: HEROES OF ROMANCE OR MODERN MEN?

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pp. 87-111

In 1904, Henry James returned to the United States from Europe, after a twenty-one-year absence, for an extended visit to his native land. The trip produced a series of seismic shocks for the sixty-one-year-old James. Big ugly factories, a society grasping for dollars and goods, and swarms of urban...

4. HENRY JAMES’S “FLAGRANT FOREIGNERS”: WHOSE COUNTRY IS THIS ANYWAY?

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pp. 113-142

Since its publication in 1904, The Golden Bowl has come to be considered one of James’s most hermetic creations, a novel whose ambiguity is nearly legendary despite all that has been written about its meaning. The plot is a simple one: Maggie Verver, the daughter of a rich American, marries Prince...

5. MARK TWAIN: RACISM, NATIVISM, AND THE TWINNING OF ITALIANNESS

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pp. 143-170

If we are foolish enough to believe Mark Twain, he performed a simple “kind of literary Caesarean operation” on the unruly tale of Siamese twins that was giving him such a struggle in the early 1890s. Dr. Twain saw the procedure as a simple one: Remove, from the main story line, the farce...

CONCLUSION: THE FIGHT FOR WHITENESS

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pp. 171-178

This study has been an attempt to look at American ideologies concerning Italy, Italians, and Italian immigrants during the decades from 1880 to 1910. My goal was to examine how those ideologies were represented, and to ask not so much what those representations say about Italy, Italians, and...

NOTES

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pp. 179-206

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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pp. 207-226

INDEX

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pp. 227-231