Italoamericana ─ The Literature of the Great Migration, 1880-1943

To appreciate the life of the Italian immigrant enclave from the great heart of the Italian migration to its settlement in America requires that one come to know how these immigrants saw their communities as colonies of the mother country. Edited with extraordinary skill, Italoamericana: The Literature of the Great Migration, 1880-1943 brings to an English-speaking audience a definitive collection of classic writings on, about, and from the formative years of the Italian-American experience.

Originally published in Italian, this landmark collection of translated writings establishes a rich, diverse, and mature sense of Italian-American life by allowing readers to see American society through the eyes of Italian-speaking immigrants. Filled with the voices from the first generation of Italian-American life, the book presents a unique treasury of long-inaccessible writing that embodies a literary canon for Italian-American culture--poetry, drama, journalism, political advocacy, history, memoir, biography, and story--the greater part of which has never before been translated.

Italoamericana introduces a new generation of readers to the "Black Hand" and the organized crime of the 1920s, the incredible "pulp" novels by Bernardino Ciambelli, Paolo Pallavicini, Italo Stanco, Corrado Altavilla, the exhilarating "macchiette" by Eduardo Migliaccio (Farfariello) and Tony Ferrazzano, the comedies by Giovanni De Rosalia, Riccardo Cordiferro's dramas and poems, the poetry of Fanny Vanzi-Mussini and Eduardo Migliaccio.

Edited by a leading journalist and scholar, Italoamericana introduces an important but little-known, largely inaccessible Italian-language literary heritage that defined the Italian-American experience. Organized into five sections--"Annals of the Great Exodus," "Colonial Chronicles," "On Stage (and Off-Stage)," "Anarchists, Socialist, Fascists, Anti-Fascists," and "Apocalyptic Integrated / Integrated Apocalyptic Intellectuals"--the volume distinguishes a literary, cultural, and intellectual history that engages the reader in all sorts of archaeological and genealogical work.

Francesco Durante is a journalist as well as Professor of literature at the University of Suor Orsola Benincasa as part of the Program in Modern Languages and Culture.

Robert Viscusi, Ph.D., is professor of English and executive officer of the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College, president of the Italian American Writers Association, novelist, critic, and scholar of Italian American literature and culture, author of the epic poem Ellis Island.

Anthony Julian Tamburri, Ph.D., is dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute (Queens College, CUNY) and former president of the Italian American Studies Association and the American Association of Teachers of Italian. His latest book is Re-reading Italian Americana (2013).

James J. Perriconi, a Manhattan attorney, exhibited his collection of more than one hundred Italian-language American imprints of authors whose works are excerpted in Italoamericana at New York's Grolier Club in 2012 and extensively catalogued these works in Strangers in a Strange Land.