Paper Boats

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.