Italian Contributions

Italian scholarship this year includes mono- and multithematic essay collections, monographic books, and numerous articles, essays, and translations of classic and contemporary literary works. The variety of methods and themes demonstrates a diverse and highly specialist range of interests, more vibrant regarding the 20th and 21st centuries. Close attention to visual and performing arts and fruitful dialogue between literature and cinema, history, geography, philosophy, religion, and ecology achieve significantly innovative contributions. Some excellent monographs—particularly relevant at national and international levels—address different authors and genres, emphasizing prose and poetry.

a. Essay Collections

'Twixt Land and Sea: Island Poetics in Anglophone Literatures, ed. Elena Spandri (Rome: Artemide), interrogates the island as a trope and a physical (and spiritual) place at the center of old and new real or imaginary routes, whose fascination embedded outstanding literary achievements in American and English literature. Opening with Spandri's brilliant "Introduction: Island Poetics and the Brexit Cultural Unconscious" (pp. 7–12) and Elizabeth Nunez's insightful "Reading Shakespeare's The Tempest in Colonial Trinidad and Writing Back" (pp. 13–23), this multiauthored volume delivers what the title promises, collecting the innovative contributions of several Italian scholars. Gianfranca Balestra's "'The Island Is a Prison'—Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed: The Tempest Retold" (pp. 37–60) provides an extensive critical analysis of Atwood's rewriting of Shakespeare's play while considering several prison theater experiences in Canada, the United States, and Italy. Sonia Di Loreto's "'Silence, Secret Histories, and Haiti'" (pp. 61–74) dwells on the collision and intersection between the archive of the "horrors" of St. Domingue and the other archive "concern[ing] the Haitian Revolution and the regeneration of the African world," focusing on Leonora Sansay's epistolary novel Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) and "Theresa, a Haytien Tale" (1828), a semianonymous short story. My essay "'Two Sides to a Tortoise' and Two Sides to an Archipelago: Illusion and Deceit in Herman Melville's The Encantadas" (pp. 77–121) presents an in-depth analysis of Melville's story, demonstrating how its 10 vignettes anticipate his last production's main features while forcing and dismantling the boundaries of the genre. Anna Anselmo reflects on female insularity in "'No Man's an Island' … But a Woman Is! Domesticity and Creativity in Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, and Sandra Cisneros" (pp. 161–86), focusing on the ambiguous, dual notion of isolation to demonstrate how this duality has been taken up and elaborated upon by the three women writers.

An international group of authors contributes to The US and the World We Inhabit, ed. Paola Loreto, Anastasia Cardone, Silvia Guslandi, and Adele Tiengo (Cambridge Scholars), with a foreword by Scott Slovic (pp. viii–xii). As the editors maintain in their introduction (pp. xviii–xix), environmental and global perspectives have recently been at the center of the most lively and urgent international scholarship. Four sections—three of which interestingly combine both literary and historical essays—organize the broad array of scopes and approaches of the contributors and display the volume's placement within the most recent theoretical and critical trends. In the first part, which questions the spatial basis of identity and the experience of belonging or not belonging generated by varying mobility or ecological outlooks, Salvatore Proietti's "On Pain and Kindred Bodies in US Science Fiction" (pp. 55–63) examines the role of suffering in identity formation by exploring the notion of "kindred bodies" in the works of Octavia Butler, Cordwainer Smith, and James Tiptree Jr. / Alice B. Sheldon. In "Gender, Generations, and Ethnicity in Louise De Salvo's Food Memoir Crazy in the Kitchen" (pp. 90–101) Francesca De Lucia presents food as a way to heal the wounds of immigration and ethnic alienation in an exhaustive analysis of the work of the Italian American writer. Environmental concerns and their relation to literature are the core of the second section that examines how various works of fiction and poetry grapple with the consequences of landscape transformation. Francesca Razzi's "'Artifex Polytechnes': Anthropocentric Aesthetics and Transcultural Perspectives in Edgar Allan Poe's The Landscape Garden" (pp. 166–76) argues for an aesthetically...