Literature

Martino Marazzi (State University of Milan)

Italian American literature can be framed in different ways: as an extension across the Atlantic of bona fide Italian literature, produced and read by immigrants to North America; as a dynamic section of American literature, placing more or less emphasis on the manifold peculiarities of its ethnic component – and, in this respect, as a product of the wider European contingent of the Great Migration, alongside the contributions by Irish, German, Jewish, Scandinavian, Greek, Polish immigrants, etc.; or as one of the various voices of the Italian diaspora worldwide. Choices of language and questions of identity define the core of such a literary field; overarching themes are those of work, family, and home, as well as the troubled relationship between individuals, communities and other social bodies, and the representation of gender roles therein.

Taken together over the course of approximately 130 years—from Luigi Donato Ventura’s tri-lingual novella Peppino (1885-1886, published in English, French, and Italian) to Joseph Tusiani’s autobiography In una casa un’altra casa trovo (2016)—the voices of Italian America map and express a collective quest for dignity through toil, education and interaction with the other agents of the American (especially urban) landscape. The ideological, political, and formal orientation of this huge body of work varies, according to the intricate divisions fragmenting the Little Italies. The reference to the Italian substratum, while oftentimes betting on the stereotypical, ultimately produces a sense of an altogether different way of being and acting Italian, in a wider context, where characters and plots—no matter how fictional—variously express prejudices and above all power relations, both at a personal and at a social level. In other words, Italian American literature can be said to start from tradition (see the cult of Dante, or the diffusion of a vaudeville theater which carries an echo of the commedia dell’arte), but soon veer toward new contents and formal experimentations. It is the literature of a changing culture, one that foregrounds its Italianness insofar as it detaches itself from the old country, exiting rural Italy after its Unification (1861), swept away by the global need for labor in a tumultuous phase of capitalist industrialism.

The literature of Italian America (a cultural sphere first critically discussed, and poetically sung, by Robert Viscusi, author of the transmedial epic Ellis Island, 2013) nowadays speaks predominantly English, but up until the early 1960s gave room to standard Italian and a notable variety of its vernacular dialects (for instance, one of the first—if not the first—complete versions of Dante’s Inferno in Apulean dialect was crafted in the Bronx by Nicola Testi, and published in Florence in 1958). Further, if we turned to Italian diasporic literature, one should also add pages composed in Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese. Sometimes, the different languages mix, fuse and cohabit, with dazzling results—see for instance the (very different) works by Syria Poletti (Argentina), François Cavanna (France), Gino Chiellino (Germany), Aquiles Bernardi (Brazil).

Likewise, and from the very beginning, Italian American literature reached its crowded and (contrary to common wisdom) not-so-illiterate audience with a considerable array of genres or stylistic codes: from the legendary daily newspaper of reference, the New York city-based Il Progresso Italo-Americano (1880-1988) to the Italian American accents of Beat poets Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (and beyond), Italian American writing has been rich in short stories and novels, poetry and plays, memoirs, diaries, nonfiction. It spanned widely the gamut of 19th- and 20th-centuries’ literary tendencies: from the urban, serialized, mystery novels (Bernardino Ciambelli) to contemporary postmodern fiction (Gilbert Sorrentino, Don DeLillo—a true master of the art); from the bilingual godfather of Italian American crime fiction (NYPD detective Mike Fiaschetti, with his You Gotta Be Rough, 1930), to ethnic modernism (Pietro di Donato’s masterful tragedy of the job, Christ in Concrete, 1939); from historical-multigenerational semi-autobiographical novels such as Helen Barolini’s Umbertina (1979) to poetical autofiction (Tina DeRosa’s Paper Fish, 1980). One finds early offers of illustrated stories, forerunners of today’s graphic novels, such as Giacomo Patri’s White Collar (1940), and photographic thrillers (see the Photocrime series in the weekly Divagando, 1950). With their personal essays, Camille Paglia and Louise DeSalvo offered distinct models of modern-day, critical female intellectuals.

To all this one must add, so to speak, exceptions to the rule, i.e. the unique art of an unmistakably Italian American (and Californian at that) writer such as John Fante, spinning contagiously readable tales of unforgettable antiheroes ‒ as well as masters of a different kind, high on the best seller lists, and creators, or influencers, of common sensibilities: Mario Puzo and his hyper-iconic Godfather (1969), Ed McBain/Evan Hunter (pen name of Salvatore Lombino) and his crime tales, or Richard Russo’s portraits of smalltown America.

Over the 20th century, and into the new millennium, Italian American poetry, too, has succeeded in reproducing and imaginatively transforming the sounds and feelings of immigrant Italians first (in the strong, militant verses of Efrem Bartoletti’s Nostalgie proletarie, 1919, and Arturo Giovannitti’s Arrows in the Gale, 1914), and later of subsequent generations, by then fully acclimatized in the American language (as brilliantly anticipated by H.L. Mencken in the 1930s), and thus able to profoundly and gloriously dwell and maneuver within it, in playful, realistic, or sober tones—see for instance the great and diverse poetical oeuvres of John Ciardi, Felix Stefanile, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, W. S. Di Piero.

Resources

Secondary Texts

Italian American Novels and Translations

Italian American Poetry and Plays

Other Italian Diasporic Literature