Critical Studies in Italian Migrations- Traveling Italy, Writing America

Illuminates why Italy continues to captivate the American imagination, connecting classic literature to contemporary memoirs and popular media that still view Italy as a site of transformation, desire, and reflection Traveling Italy, Writing America argues that the American idea of Italy, at once sunny and dark, refined and excessive, has played a crucial role in shaping both U.S. national identity and Italian American literary self-fashioning. The book shows how this idea was forged in nineteenth-century American travel writing and later reimagined by early Italian American authors as a means of claiming cultural legitimacy within the United States. Beginning with Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James, the study demonstrates how Italy became a stage on which Americans rehearsed questions of taste, class, and national identity. It then turns to Antonio Arrighi, Pascal D’Angelo, and Giuseppe Cautela, showing how these writers appropriated familiar tropes of aesthetic ideal and passionate excess, recasting them as autoethnographic tools through which to assert Italian American subjectivity within a racialized literary marketplace. Rather than accepting a simple historical shift from Italophilia to Italophobia, the book reveals a persistent push-and-pull between attraction and repulsion, in which admiration and anxiety coexist and immigrant writers learn to work productively within that tension. The book’s intervention is twofold. First, it relocates early Italian American literature from the margins of ""ethnic writing"" into the broader genealogy of American travel writing and U.S. literary history. Second, it reframes debates about cultural hierarchy and aesthetic value through the lens of autoethnography, showing how…