Chiara Mazzucchelli – författare

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 the Island, which focused on Sicilian American literary production, Chiara Mazzucchelli turns her gaze back to Sicily itself, uncovering how authors such as Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana, Maria Messina, Luigi Pirandello, and others portrayed emigration, loss, and transnational identity. Bridging literary analysis and migration studies, the book introduces Anglophone readers to a rich yet largely overlooked body of texts, offering new insights into Sicilian cultural memory and historical imagination. With its accessible style, interdisciplinary scope, and focus on displacement, modernity, and belonging, this volume is an essential resource for scholars, students, and general readers interested in Italian studies, migration history and literature, cultural identity, and global modernism. By situating Sicilian literature within broader diasporic narratives, Mazzucchelli's study speaks to enduring questions about the roots and repercussions of migration—then and now.

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 itself in a corpus of texts that, although subsumed under the broader context of Italian literature, have distinguished themselves as examples of an exquisitely Sicilian literary experience. Mazzucchelli argues that a parallel phenomenon-sicilianamericanità-has emerged in the United States. Focusing on the island's geography, history, and culture, she examines how many American authors of Sicilian descent derive inspiration from their ethnic milieu and lay out a recognizable set of Sicilian culture markers in their works, thereby producing a literature that is distinctly Sicilian American. Drawing on both Italian and Italian American scholarship, The Heart and the Island is the first full-length study of Sicilian American literature, and it opens a space for new interdisciplinary discussions on what it means to be Italian on both sides of the ocean.