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Italian identities are of many kinds: national, regional, diasporic, historical, linguistic, personal, literary. The term can cover both identities that are intimately bound up with the idea of Italy and those which are simply the individual identities of people, places and things, both within Italy and in transnational Italian communities. This book brings together many notions and manifestations of Italian identity in order to display the wide variety of forms that Italian identities might take and how they interrelate, and attempts to identify just what an Italian identity might be.
In their diversity of form, this volume sets out to show how these identities range from a linguistic identity created by a great author, Dante Alighieri, and how translation of his Commedia can be approached in a new hybridised way through to its analysis in a literary context that also takes note of digital technologies and other pressing social questions of our time, through to material-discursive explorations of environment issues and discussion of personal identities linked to gender and sexuality. The question of identity and belonging is also explored through the lens of an 'accidental' Italian identity formulated by colonial overlords and utilised strategically by Greek migrants from the Dodecanese travelling to Australia. Lastly, the collection explores notions of regional identity within the broader Italian nation state, with a particular focus on Sicily.
Italian identity is thus revealed as a multifaceted and multivalent notion touching on many aspects of Italian history, culture and society, and articulated comprehensively through Italy's rich literary tradition, emerging issues in environment studies and the reconfiguration of identity and sense of community arising from migration in a transnational context.
About the author
Diana Glenn is Emeritus Professor of Italian at Flinders University and is the author of Dante's Reforming Mission and Women in the Comedy (2008) and has published numerous scholarly articles nationally and internationally.
