NEW AISCLI SERIES 2024 – Manuela D’Amore presents her book “Literary Voices of the Italian Diaspora in Britain”. Respondent: Marilena Parlati

Manuela D'Amore (University of Catania) presents her book: "Literary Voices of the Italian Diaspora in Britain". Respondent: Marilena Parlati (University of Padua)

Manuela D’Amore,  Literary Voices of the Italian Diaspora in Britain . Time, Transnational Identities and Hybridity,  Palgrave Macmillan (2023)

The book:

• Studies the work of 21 Italian authors working in Britan from the 1930s to today
• Shows how the Italian community has been represented in Italian British literary works
• Analyzes transnational, diasporic Italian identities across England, Scotland, and Wales

This volume studies the literary voices of the Italian diaspora in Britain, including 21 authors and 34 pieces of prose, verse, and drama. This book shows how authors both recount the history of the migrant community in the period 1880-1980 while creatively experimenting with hybrid forms of expression and blending words with visuals. Literary Voices of the Italian Diaspora in Britain discusses topical issues like migration and social integration, cultures and foods in transition, as well as plurilingualism. The book pays special attention to discussions of the horrors of the Second World War – especially on the tragedy of the Arandora Star (2^nd July 1940) – to show this literary community’s political commitments. More importantly, it will begin to fill the void left by a critical tradition which has only appreciated the northern American and Australian branches of Italian writing.

Manuela D’Amore is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Catania (Italy). She has translated and edited Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (1741), W.M. Rossetti’s The P.R.B. Journal (1848-1853) and more recently Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s Beauty and the Beast (1867). Her latest monographs are Essays in Defence of the Female Sex. Custom, Education and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England, co-written with Michèle Lardy (Paris Sorbonne I) (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), and The Royal Society and the Discovery of the Two Sicilies. Southern Routes in the Grand Tour (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Marilena Parlati is Full Professor in British and Anglophone Literatures at the University of Padua (Italy). Her main areas of research are British and Australian literatures and cultures of the long nineteenth century, namely thing culture, commodity culture and waste issues; she also works on contemporary fiction related to trauma, disability, environmental and postcolonial cultural issues, suspended and altered embodiment, with a book on these issues forthcoming, and essays on contemporary authors such as Jim Crace, Hanif Kureishi, J.M. Coetzee, Eva Figes, Rosa Cappiello, Christos Tsiolkas. With Joseph Pugliese, she has just edited a special issue of From the European South, dedicated to Aftermaths. Vulnerable Times, Vanishing Places, Toxic Erasures and she is currently working on a book tentatively entitled T/Rubble. Toxic Legacies, Fraught Memoyscapes, dedicated to nuclearity, trauma and slow violence in contemporary diasporic and indigenous cultures.