The Diasporic Canon: American Anthologies of Contemporary Italian Poetry 1945-2015

The Diasporic Canon is the first monograph to be dedicated to the history of a national literary canon in another language and country. By exploring Italian poetry's potential for mobility and transformation, it traces its reception in the U.S. and translation into English as an expression of the culture of Italian migration to North America. The result is the evolution, from the 1940s up to the present, of a radically different canon from the domestic one, i.e. a canon that has been built upon historical anticipations of later developments in Italy, transcontinental influences, but also inversions, distortions, and even errors. In a rigorous yet ground-breaking survey that analyses almost one-hundred anthologies, Marta Arnaldi argues that the theoretical concept of diaspora presents us with a new idea of canonicity, one that puts forward a renewed image of literature in translation and of its significance, whilst also problematising received ideas of nationality, ethnicity, gender, genre, and authorship.

Marta Arnaldi is a Laming Research Fellow at The Queen's College, Oxford, and a Stipendiary Lecturer in Italian at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is the author of a prize-winning collection of poetry.