Italian Contributions

Italian scholarship this year includes mono- and multithematic essay collections, monographic books, articles, and journal issues. The variety of methods and themes shows a diverse range of interests, especially vast and vibrant regarding the 19th and 20th centuries. It seems possible to individuate a trend toward the departure from canonical viewpoints; a comparative attention to music, visual, and performing arts; and the establishment of fruitful dialogues between literary studies and historical and historiographical, geographical, philosophical, ecocritical, and religious approaches.

a. Essay Collections

Paola Loreto and Cristina Iuli have edited an excellent companion: La letteratura degli Stati Uniti: Dal Rinascimento americano ai giorni nostri (Rome: Carocci). Aimed at providing university students with a comprehensive yet synthetic literary history since the mid-19th century, this multiauthored collection delivers what the title promises. Setting aside discussions on historiographical and methodological issues, the outline of American literary history is articulated in entry points or reading trajectories organized in 16 chapters followed by a bibliography and indexes of authors and works. New perspectives and fresh approaches revitalize known interpretative categories or chronological cuts in essays such as Leonardo Buonomo's on major 19th-century works read as declarations of independence, Cristina Iuli's on modernist aesthetics and mass media, Paola Loreto's on modernist poetry as voice poetics, Sonia Di Loreto's on slave narratives, Paola Nardi's on women's narratives during the 19th and 20th centuries, and Cinzia Scarpino's on 1930s narratives. Alessandra Calanchi's "Hardboiled, Noir, Thriller: La paura come sottogenere letterario" (pp. 229–48) deploys an original approach to fear as literary subgenre (or aesthetic category to which different literary subgenres are deeply connected), tracing contemporary crime and horror fiction back to its origin in Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, through the pulps, to Stephenie Meyer and Stephen King. In his contribution on the post-World War II novel, "Il romanzo del secondo dopoguerra (1945–60)" (pp. 249–70), Valerio Massimo De Angelis surveys the main currents of narrative prose and theater from 1945 to the 1960s, tracing trajectories from modernism to the Cold War years and a diverse range of cultural and ideological tendencies from war novels to science fiction, from the Beats to the Southern Gothic, connected in different ways to the perception of the imperial expansion of U.S. power in the world.

The premise of Faith in literature: Religione, cultura e identità negli Stati Uniti d'America, ed. Mirella Vallone (Perugia: Morlacchi), is the complex role of religion in American history, both centripetal in creating cultural homogeneity and unity, and centrifugal in fostering differences and fragmentation. Vallone's introduction provides an overview of the historical religious pluralism and of the pivotal role of the Puritan cultural component in the birth of the nation and its founding texts. While the separation of church and state did not allow the existence of a state religion, religious faith nonetheless played an important role as stabilizer of republican virtues and component of the moral frame of the new republic. Vallone's recognition of the historiographical and theoretical issues is followed by nine chapters devoted to the study of religion, culture, and identity observed in literature, including authors belonging to the Protestant mainstream (Carla Vergaro on John Winthrop's A Modell of Christian Charity; Giuseppe Nori on Stephen Crane) as well as minorities: Jewish American (Alessandra Calanchi on Delmore Schwartz), African American (Paola Boi on James Baldwin), Mesoamerican and Chicano (Anna Sulai Capponi on Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima), Italian American (Sabrina Vellucci on religion and self-representation in late-20th-century women's literature and cinema), Arab American (Lisa Marchi on the poetry of Suheir Hammad and Naomi Shihab Nye), Native American (Giorgio Mariani on Sherman Alexie), and Islamic American (Vallone on Mohja Kahf). Through these critical surveys covering an ample and diverse spectrum of chronological and cultural experiences, we see religion(s) at work as a source of ritual, dogma, and cult but also doubts, identity quests, and cultural negotiations.

An international group of authors contributed to Harbors, Flows, and Migrations. The collection aims at interrogating the harbor as a trope and a physical space at the...