San Antonio College Library

"Robert Viscusi takes a comprehensive look at Italian American writing by exploring the connections between language and culture in Italian American experience and major literary texts. Italian immigrants, Viscusi argues, considered even their English to be a dialect of Italian, and therefore attempted to create an American English fully reflective of their historical, social, and cultural positions. This approach allows us to see Italian American...

This study shows how, in the nineteenth century, Americans often described and narrated Italy as a way of reflecting on their own country and national identity in genres as various as travel literature, fiction, poetry, and journalism. Indeed, maintains author Leonardo Buonomo, Italy helped the Americans to relativize, if not redefine, the very idea of Americanness. The texts discussed here are James Fenimore Cooper's The Bravo (1831), Henry T. Tuckerman's...