Examines how Sicilian writers explored themes of displacement, identity, and transnational cultural memory as they engaged with the Great Emigration to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.This groundbreaking study is the first comprehensive English-language exploration of how Sicilian writers responded to the Great Emigration to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Building on her earlier book, The Heart and...

Makes the case for a distinctly Sicilian American literature.In The Heart and the Island, Chiara Mazzucchelli explores the strong bond between Sicilian American writers and the island of Sicily. Self-contained yet connected to the mainland, geographically separated from yet politically united to the rest of Italy, Sicily occupies a unique position. Throughout the twentieth century, the sense of a distinct sicilianità-or Sicilianness-has manifested...

This volume assembles for the first time a staggering multiplicity of reflections and readings of John Fante’s 1939 classic, Ask the Dust, a true testament to the work’s present and future impact.The contributors to this work—writers, critics, fans, scholars, screenwriters, directors, and others—analyze the provocative set of diaspora tensions informing Fante’s masterpiece that distinguish it from those accounts of earlier East Coast migrations and minglings. A must-read f...