Paper Boats by Chiara Mazzucchelli

Paper Boats by Chiara Mazzucchelli

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.

"With Paper Boats, Chiara Mazzucchelli not only fills a gap in literary criticism but also raises fundamental questions about the role of literature in preserving historical memory and giving voice to the experiences of the subaltern classesThis book is an invitation to reconsider the relationship between literature and society, between aesthetics and politics, and to explore how the past continues to shape the present. Mazzucchelli's work represents a milestone in migration studies and will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the deep roots of one of the most universal and yet most distinctly Italian experiences of modernity." — Giuseppe Raudino, Hanze University

"Mazzucchelli offers a literary analysis that does not merely celebrate the great names of Sicilian literature; rather, her narrative inquiry delves into the social, political, and psychological complexity of a phenomenon that has indelibly marked the nation's history. Paper Boats, positioned halfway between literary criticism and historical reflection, also provides insights for the present, reminding us how literature can help us understand the challenges and sufferings of past migrations, sufferings not unlike the marginalization, inequalities, and material and cultural poverty of today's spiritual neocapitalism." — Antonino Contiliano, Retroguardia

Chiara Mazzucchelli is Professor and Dr. Neil Euliano Chair in Italian Studies at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of The Heart and the Island: A Critical Study of Sicilian American Literature, also published by SUNY Press, and Bastimenti d'inchiostro. La Grande Emigrazione nella letteratura siciliana (1876–1924).