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Travelling In and Out of Italy: 19th and 20th-Century Notebooks, Letters and Essays
Author(s): Emanuele Occhipinti (Author)
- Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
- Publication Date: 14 Jun. 2011
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 125 pages
- ISBN-10: 1443829196
- ISBN-13: 9781443829199
Book Description
Travel has often been taken as a metaphor for human life, and the concept of travel and the traveller has varied across centuries, cultural traditions, and social groups. Following a diachronic overview of travel writing, this study considers some of the most important Italian writers of the late nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, such as D’Annunzio, Pirandello, Svevo, with particular focus on their note-books, letters, travel diaries, and reportage. An analysis of this material indicates that these authors collect their miscellaneous notes, in some cases, as private and personal documents, and in other instances to possibly develop future articles, essays or novels. It goes on to focus on the journey par excellence, the trip to America, regarded as an Eden. In many of their works, writers such as Ojetti, Giacosa, Cecchi, Piovene express their ambivalence towards a place often idealized as a land of freedom and opportunity, yet also acknowledged as a land where oppression and violence are all too real. The study attempts to demonstrate how all the traveller-writers discussed “translate” their sense of discovery in their books, and the extent to which that sense affects the conception of each of the texts.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘Professor Occhipinti s engaging in-depth analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century travel writing in Italy sheds invaluable light on a resoundingly successful phenomenon, destined to constitute a literary genre in its own right. The book effectively explores thought-provoking themes such as: the links of travel-literature with journalism, the epistolary and the narrative genre; the socio-geographical, political and cultural implications linked to travel; as well as the fascinating theme of the journey viewed as a metaphor of the human self, and thus as an experience in self-cognition and self-analysis.’ –Prof. Maria Cristina Cignatta, English Language Lecturer, University of Parma, Italy
About the Author
Emanuele Occhipinti is Associate Professor and Director of the Italian Program at Drew University, New Jersey, USA. He has published on Italo Svevo and Igino Ugo Tarchetti and is the editor of New Approaches to Teaching Italian Language and Culture: Case Studies from an International Perspective. He serves as Associate Editor (Profession and Pedagogy) for NeMLA Italian Studies. His area of specialisation covers eighteenth century to contemporary Italian Literature, with a focus on travel literature, the Italian American experience, psychoanalysis, film, cultural and comparative studies, and language paedagogy.
