Bücher der Reihe Transatlantic Aesthetics and Culture

This book focuses on the development of Italian American cultural identity throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.Italy is becoming a destination, rather than a starting point for immigrants. Immigration remains a source of tension and debate both in the United States and in Europe. Analyzing the evolution of Italian American identity, from diaspora to globalization, from emblematic to latent ethnicity, can thus prove insightful.Disparate works, including novels, films and newspaper articles, both by Italian and non-Italian American authors illustrate this paradigm. The catalyst for this transformation is the Second World War, which allowed Italian Americans to take part in the struggle to liberate Italy from Fascism, establishing in this way a connection with their roots while adhering more closely to mainstream American society through participation in the conflict. Post-war expressions of Italian American culture include the development of women's writing, cinematic interactions with American Jews and African Americans, and the works of two novelists, Don DeLillo and Anthony Giardina, who embody different aspects of latent ethnicity.

The full story of modernism is yet to be written. This collection of essays provides an important page in this complex and inconclusive story of fluidities and hybridities by rendering problematical the linear sequence from modernism to postmodernism. This book explores the many facets of modernism in a variety of essays written by an international group of scholars. It deals with and puts in question the western literary tradition in many of its transcontinental and trans-hemispheric encounters. Criticism of ¿high modernism¿ is put in perspective by discussions of German ¿reactionary modernism¿, American ¿social modernism¿ and ¿minor arts¿, mid-twentieth-century ¿Baudelairean modernity¿ and unprecedented expansions of the concepts of modernity and modernism themselves. Engaging in dialogue with the newest geographical, transnational, and global enlargements of the concept of modernism in time and space (from the ¿Middle Passage¿ to emergent cultures of the twenty-first century, from Europe to America, Africa and Asia), the volume covers a wide range of translocal and transtemporal literary, artistic, cultural, and social fields and perspectives.

Cross-Cultural Encounters between the Mediterranean and the English-Speaking Worlds

Taking their cue from the polymorphous relationship between word and image, the essays of this book explore how different media translate the world of phenomena into aesthetic, intellectual or sensual experience. They embrace the media of poetry, fiction, drama, engraving, painting, photography, film and advertising posters ranging from the early modern to the postmodern periods. At the heart of the volume lie essays on works that characteristically perform intriguing interactions between the verbal and visual modes. They discuss the manifold ways in which artists as different as William Blake or Gertrude Stein, Diane Arbus or Stanley Kubrick heighten the tension between the linguistic and the seen. Taken both individually and collectively, this volume¿s contributions illuminate the problematics of how readers and spectators/lookers transform verbal and visual representation into worlds of seeming.

This volume is the product of a joint effort to bring together critical views "from the Old World" on the field of American Studies. All in all, this book provides the critical gaze of the "expert outsider" who is able to offer a somewhat different but complementary point of view, which can only enrich the general appreciation of American Studies.

US and German military cemeteries in Italy differ in style and message. Analysis, interpretation, and research reveal each nation's ideological character at the time of their design, and point to US becoming politically conservative and conformist, while (West) Germany sought new values.