The gangster, in the hands of the Italian American artist, becomes a telling figure in the tale of American race, gender, and ethnicity - a figure that reflects the autobiography of an immigrant group just as it reflects the fantasy of a native population.From Wiseguys to Wise Men studies the figure of the gangster and explores its social function in the construction and projection of masculinity in the United States. By looking at the cultural icon of the gangste...

Crossing Borders is a gathering of twenty original, interdisciplinary essays on the paradigm of borders in African American literature, multi-ethnic U.S. studies, and South Asian studies. These essays by established and mid-career scholars from around the globe employ a variety of approaches to the idea of “border crossings” and represent important contributions to the discourses on modernity, diasporic mobility, populism, migration, exile, sub-nation, trans-nation, as well as the formatio...

Ten stories of impoverished Sicilian women in the early 20th century—"honed, polished, devastatingly direct . . . verismo at its unsentimental best" ( Kirkus Reviews).The Sicilian writer Maria Messina's captivating and brutal stories of the women of her home island are presented in a "lyrical and immediate" English translation by Elise Magistro ( Publishers Weekly).Messina, who died in 1944, was the foremost female practitioner of verismo—...

Winner: Vasiliki Karagiannaki Prize for the Best Edited Volume in Modern Greek StudiesPromotes the understanding of Italian Americans and Greek Americans through the study of their interactions and juxtapositions.Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation contributes to U.S. ethnic and immigration studies by bringing into conversation scholars working in the fields of Italian American and ...

This book is addressed to “lovers of paradoxes” and we have done our utmost to assemble a stellar cast of Neapolitan and American scholars, intellectuals, and artists/writers who are strong and open-minded enough to wrestle with and illuminate the paradoxes through which Naples presents itself. Naples is a mysterious metropolis. Difficult to understand, it is an enigma to outsiders, and also to the Neapolitans themselves. Its very impenetrableness is what makes it so deliriously and irresi...

In the first major critical reading of Italian American narrative literature in two decades, Fred L. Gardaphé presents an interpretive overview of Italian American literary history. Examining works from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, he develops a new perspective—variously historical, philosophical, and cultural—by which American writers of Italian descent can be read, increasing the discursive power of an ethnic literature that has received too little serious critical a...

A fatherless boy is conflicted by his Catholic upbringing and his dreams in this coming-of-age novelEast Liberty is a poetic, passionate coming-of-age novel spanning 1955 to 1963, set in an Italian-American neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Roberto (Bobby) Renzo, the novel's fatherless narrator and main character, lives with Francene Renzo, his beautiful, mysterious, and unconventional mother who gave birth to him out of wedlock. Together the two habitually watc...