The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature: Life Sentences and Their Geographies

Description

Using an array of cultural documents from 1990 to the present, including diaries, testimonies, fiction, online video postings, and anti-mafia social networks, Robin Pickering-Iazzi examines the myths, values, codes of behaviour, and relationships produced by the Italian mafia through a wide cross-disciplinary lens. The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature explores the ways that these literary engagements with the mafia relate to broader contemporary Italian life and offer implicit challenges, and a quiet code of resistance, to the trauma and injustice wrought by the mafia in various Italian cities. Despite the long tradition of representing the mafia in Italian literature, until now women's contributions to this literature have been overlooked. Pickering-Iazzi's aim is to encourage new critical reflection on a broader selection of literature through new theoretical lenses in order to enrich our understanding of crime fiction, Sicily and Sicilian identity in literature, narrative traits of the new Italian epic, and the cultural and social functions of storytelling in life and literature. Cover Title page Copyright page Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Mafia Cityworlds: Geographies of Narration 1. The Female Mafia Imaginary: Contemporary Mafiose and Gabriella Badalamenti’s Come l’oleandro 2. The Mafia and the (Non)sense of Place: Amelia Crisantino’s Cercando Palermo 3. Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s Postmodern Geography of Impegno: Mafia Urban Desertification in Canto al deserto: Storia di Tina, soldato di mafia 4. Mafia Geographies of Voicelessness: Silvana La Spina’s L’ultimo treno da Catania 5. Engendering Testimonial Geographies of Legality: Bodily Interiors, Urban Faces, Cyberspatialities Notes Works Cited Index Cultural Spaces