Poets of the Italian Diaspora - A Bilingual Anthology (Hardcover)

In a period spanning one hundred years, more than thirty million Italians abandoned their country to emigrate abroad in search for work. From 1870 to 1914, the year in which emigration reached its peak of nine hundred thousand, ten million people left Italy. Between 1870 and 1970 about twenty-seven million migrants left Italy to work and live abroad. As a result, the Italian diaspora numbers 60 million around the world, more than the present population of Italy. In the United States, the study of Italian immigration began early, but while the study of Italians in every part of the world has now been consolidated, the task of analyzing Italian emigration in a global and comparative perspective that includes its literary production has not even begun. To be sure, there are studies and anthologies that deal with the literature of Italian migration in a few individual countries, such as the United States and Canada, but there is no anthology of the literature of the Italian Diaspora that places it in a global context.