Italian Contributions

Italian contributions to American literary studies are particularly noteworthy this year. Collections and proceedings are numerous and manifold, making it difficult to classify them into specific categories of chronology and/or genre. Questions of cross-culturality, transnationality, and multidisciplinarity have been a prime concern among individual scholars and research groups who have worked both at national and international levels. Modernism and the great masters of the 19th and 20th centuries remain privileged fields of research. The praiseworthy activity of translation has also engaged scholars with interesting contributions, offering Italian readers new insights into the great riches of American literature. I would like to thank Prof. Gregory Dowling for his assistance.

a. Essay Collections

Lo sguardo esiliato—Cultura europea e cultura americana fra delocalizzazione e radicamento, ed. Cristina Giorcelli and Camilla Cattarulla (Casoria, Naples: Loffredo Editore), is an exploration of the question of exile in the plurality of its contemporary interpretations, as Giorcelli eruditely discusses in her preface. The collection, which is the result of ongoing research of the Dipartimento di Studi Euro-Americani of the University of Roma Tre, is a significant example of the effort to approach American studies and literature from an international perspective, examining both their American and their European contexts. Exile as voluntary expatriation may become the critical implement for intellectual explorations combining visions from different cultures into new creative syntheses, as Giorcelli argues in her own essay in the volume, "'A Development Which Abandons Nothing en Route': L'intertestualità del cosmopolita Henry James" (pp. 195–216); or it may be chosen as a path toward emancipation, as discussed by Cristina Scatamacchia in "Elizabeth Banks: Una giornalista americana in 'esilio volontario' nella Londra di fine Ottocento" (pp. 371–90); or again as fecund challenge, as in the case of James Baldwin, whose constant "commuting" between the United States and Europe lay at the base of his aesthetic and ethical commitment (Sara Antonelli, "'The Self as Journey': L'esilio di James Baldwin," pp. 17–39). Exile as an existential condition is the subject of Paolo Marolda's "Richard Rorty tra Europa e Stati Uniti: La conversione del Pragmatismo in Ermeneutica" (pp. 285–301); Vincenzo Maggitti's "Il duplice 'esilio' di Erich von Stroheim" (pp. 247–67); and Carla Scura's "Vladimir Nabokov o dell'indicibile libertà dell'esilio" (pp. 391–409), in which physical displacement is compared with cultural nomadism. Transculturation as a means of bridging different artistic discourses is the subject of Fabio Saglimbeni's "'Nina dei Pirati': Extraterritorialità, identità ed esilio in Ella Fitzgerald e Nina Simone" (pp. 335–53), which focuses on Bertolt Brecht's epic theater correlated with Fitzgerald's and Simone's jazz performances. From a condition of exile there may also emerge an "imaginative creation of an ideal polity," as pointed out by Maria Giulia Fabi in her analysis of Pauline E. Hopkins's Of One Blood, a novel in which for African Americans Ethiopia replaces the Old Continent as the utopian land of cultural pride ("Exile and Utopia in Pauline E. Hopkins's Of One Blood," pp. 141–59). Maria Anita Stefanelli discusses Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill as a recreation of the conditions of the exile suffered by his forefathers, furthering the discourse on the complexity of the topic governing the collection ("Da O'Neill a O'Neill," pp. 449–63).

Dialogues/Confrontations: Border Zones in the U.S.A. and in the American Continent, also edited by Cristina Giorcelli for the series Letterature d'America (vols. 27–28, nos. 117–18, 2007–08), is a collection specifically devoted to the issues of hybridity and excentricity, marginality and cross-culturality, in the New World, ranging from European colonization to individual and collective definitions of American identity. Floriana Puglisi and Cinzia Biagiotti both address the encounter of Europeans with the Native American "others." Puglisi discusses the issues of the native culture and language as "interpreted" by newcomers upon their first encounter with the "new country," both in history and in the present day ("Native Encounters: Representing Otherness in Roger Williams and Rosmarie Waldrop's A Key into the Language of America," pp. 5–28), while Biagiotti faces...