On 6 November 1906, the philosopher and poet from Gorizia, Carlo Michelstaedter, an Austrian national of Jewish extraction with a central European education, attended the staging of ‘A figghia di Joriu by the Compagnia Drammatica Siciliana at Florence's Teatro Niccolini. That same night, ‘completely drained due to the feelings experienced’ and still prey to ‘the anxiety that grows and makes one truly suffer, constricting one's throat’, he conveyed his strong emotions to his family:

This assessment hit the mark, for La figlia di Iorio (Iorio's Daughter) was largely indebted to the attraction of dialect and the appeal of Giovanni Grasso, judged to be the world's greatest tragic actor by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Isaac Babel, Gordon Craig, Lee Strasberg and Vsevolod Meyerhold.

This chapter documents the transformations of La figlia di Iorio during its ‘second life’ in dialect, including translations into Sicilian by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese and into the Abruzzo dialect by Cesare de Titta, and the parody in Neapolitan by Eduardo Scarpetta. Why was the play so well suited to dialect translations? What did dialect mean for Gabriele D’Annunzio, and how did he contribute to these translations and their staging?

Hitherto I may say that my lines had fallen in pleasant places—especially when, in the course of a few months after my marriage, my brother returned from Philadelphia, and became a clerk to one of the most respectable merchants in the city. This was a pleasant reunion, and all things went prosperous—my thrift was thriving, and the time when Rebecca expected to be a mother was drawing nigh. But a sentence against the city had gone forth, and the angel of the pestilence was on the threshold of heaven, shaking his black wings for a flight to the earth. About the middle of July he alighted in New York, and with a phial in each hand, filled with the wrath of the yellow fever, he began to pour out the desolation.

On the 12th of August, a wail and lamentation spread throughout the town—Rachel weeping for her children; then there was a hurrying to and fro—the inhabitants flying from destruction, followed by carts loaded with furniture, feather-beds, and tables,—a universal flitting. The city was forsaken, and Silence, with weeping eyes, sat in the market-place.

We, having no friends in the country to fly to, and not having money to support us there in idleness, concluded that it was ordained for a purpose, that we should remain in the midst of the calamity—and in this frame of mind, I invited my brother and my wife's mother to join us in an offering to the Lord. We assembled in the evening; it was the Sabbath, and on that day there had been no worship, for the stern angel with his phials stood at the church-door, and the worshippers dreaded to enter.

The air was fearfully warm, and our windows were open. The setting sun shone in upon us, and we all thought, as we prepared for the prayer, that there was a yellow drowsiness in his eye, as if the glory of the world was smitten with mortal disease—we contemplated the prodigy in silence, and when he disappeared, we all fell by one thought upon our knees. It was my intent to have spoken, but utterance was denied to me: we folded our hands, and offered ourselves to the mercy of Providence with the voices of our hearts.

Shortly after my adventure, I was agreeably surprised by a visit from our old friend and uncle, Mr. Hoskins. It was not altogether unexpected, but it had come to pass a little earlier than we reckoned upon; the room intended for him not being then quite finished. However, we were all happy at the meeting, and as he had himself been a rough settler in the woods of Vermont, he was easily accommodated, and looked upon apologies as superfluities.

Although he said nothing himself on the subject, yet I soon perceived that his visit to Babelmandel was not dictated altogether by affection for his niece, my wife, and that in the journey he had an eye awake to number one. His latter specs had not proved such beneficial operations as some of his earlier, and he had improved his farm in Vermont quite as much as it was worth while to do, considering the limited market in his neighbourhood; in a word, he was inclined to sell his betterments there, and embark in a new trade. He had, indeed, hinted as much to me when I originally proposed to come into the Genesee country, so that the purpose of his visit was with a view to both or either of these objects.

The first afternoon we spent in jocose temperance. I rehearsed to him all the adventures of our voyage and journey from New York, the tribulations we had suffered in the woods, and the prospect beginning to dawn around us, with all which he was well pleased; but when I proposed to accompany him next morning over the settlement, he said—

“No: I guess Squire Laurie talks too much—when a man's a-making calculations, his company ain't partikler precious, and flashing in the pan scares ducks. The gentleman will ‘scuse me.”

I certainly did not think this was very civilised; but he was in all things a plain spoken man, and had proved the sincerity of his friendship by five hundred excellent reasons; so I did not answer him just so tartly as my inclination at the time prompted.

Of the Dealings of Edward Bellingham with William Monkhouse Lee, and of the cause of the great terror of Abercrombie Smith, it may be that no absolute and final judgment will ever be delivered. It is true that we have the full and clear narrative of Smith himself, and such corroboration as he could look for from Thomas Styles the servant, from the Reverend Plumptree Peterson, Fellow of Old’s, and from such other people as chanced to gain some passing glance at this or that incident in a singular chain of events. Yet, in the main, the story must rest upon Smith alone, and the most will think that it is more likely that one brain, however outwardly sane, has some subtle warp in its texture, some strange flaw in its workings, than that the path of nature has been over-stepped in open day in so famed a centre of learning and light as the University of Oxford. Yet when we think how narrow and how devious this path of nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom ever shadowly upwards, it is a bold and confident man who will put a limit to the strange by-paths into which the human spirit may wander.

In a certain wing of what we will call Old College in Oxford there is a corner turret of an exceeding great age. The heavy arch which spans the open door has bent downwards in the centre under the weight of its years, and the grey, lichen-blotched blocks of stone are bound and knitted together with withes and strands of ivy, as though the old mother had set herself to brace them up against wind and weather. From the door a stone stair curves upward spirally, passing two landings, and terminating in a third one, its steps all shapeless and hollowed by the tread of so many generations of the seekers after knowledge. Life has flowed like water down this winding stair, and, waterlike, has left these smooth-worn grooves behind it. From the long-gowned, pedantic scholars of Plantagenet days down to the young bloods of a later age, how full and strong had been that tide of young English life.

The three most celebrated poets of post-unification Italy – Giosuè Carducci, Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D’Annunzio – shared an openness towards new directions in European literature. Carducci was attracted to French and, especially, German writers, including Béranger and Heine; Pascoli had quickly recognised and often anticipated the innovations of Symbolist poetry, in particular its French strand; and D’Annunzio absorbed and gave fresh creative impetus to the thematic and linguistic ideas of the Decadent movement, using France as the launching pad for his international fame. For all three, this cosmopolitan vein coexisted with a sense of the modernity of the ancient world and a desire to return to Greek and Latin classics. All three engaged in translations or, as D’Annunzio called them, ‘betrayals’ (tradimenti); indeed his first book, Primo vere (1879), its Latinate title a reference to Carducci's poem ‘Vere novo’, included an appendix with versions of classical poems (fourteen from Horace, two from Catullus, one from Tibullus and four from the Homeric Hymns). Of the three, Pascoli was the most diligent and philologically skilled; he not only compiled classical anthologies (Lyra and Epos), but also composed poetry in Latin. For Carducci, the return to antiquity involved experimentation with classical metre in his ‘metrica barbara’, something the young D’Annunzio also tried. First and foremost, however, it involved a view of the world: the Risorgimento nostalgia for the glories of Rome and a forceful, heroic neopaganism. In this regard, D’Annunzio situated himself as Carducci's heir, declaring himself to be the ‘vate’ (bard) of the new Italy.

This chapter focuses on D’Annunzio's role as a fin-de-siècle classicist. It first investigates his library at the Vittoriale and then discusses classical echoes in La città morta (1898), Fedra (1909) and Alcyone (1903). This allows for an exploration of D’Annunzio's approach to translations from Latin and Greek, his use of Latin sources to revitalise Italian, classical references in his writing and the inspiration he found in Greek theatre to reconceive tragedy. While D’Annunzio's celebration of the ancient world was selective and based on his own political perspective, his interpretation of ancient Greece and Rome profoundly influenced his creative vision. This chapter illustrates how a rich dialogue with the classics shaped his concept of Weltliteratur.

Gabriele D’Annunzio's Fiume escapade of 1919 has sometimes been incorporated into the story of nineteenth-century Italian irredentism described by Angelo Vivante in his 1914 Irredentismo Adriatico, where it serves as something of a coda to the Italo-Austrian conflict that ended with the First World War. It was also, however, a transitional episode, setting the stage for Italy's long and troubled relationship with the independent territories that would become Yugoslavia and, subsequently, its successor states. In this context, a number of figures, objects of art, culture and political life would change locations, crossing from one shore to the other, sometimes in forced migrations. Their stories became a staple of Italian and Yugoslav life for some three generations.

This chapter explores a single, somewhat unlikely example, in the form of the ‘maraschino’ cherry brandy for which the city of Zara, today's Zadar of Croatia, was once renowned. Specifically, it follows the life trajectory of the Luxardo brand begun by the entrepreneur Girolamo Luxardo in 1821, which bears a name worth exploring in the context of D’Annunzio's worldwide notoriety. This name is announced on the bottle itself, where, just beneath ‘Cherry Brandy’, one finds the words Sangue Morlacco, below which appears this explanatory phrase: ‘Il liquore cupo che alla mensa di Fiume chiamavo “Sangue Morlacco”’, (the dark liqueur that I called ‘Morlach's blood’ at the Fiume mess hall), which is followed by D’Annunzio's flowing signature. The history of this coinage, which is associated with the Luxardo family, their company and the long afterlife of D’Annunzio's Fiume adventure, provides an opportunity for exploring D’Annunzio's perceived cultural authority, especially for Italians displaced from Istria and Dalmatia following the Second World War, as well as the stereotypes and cultural assumptions of Italians vis-a-vis their eastern neighbours. As Noel Malcolm has shown in his Agents of Empire, trading families often served as the primary conduits for crossings of commerce, culture and politics over centuries of Adriatic life. This was no less true of the D’Annunzios and the Luxardos.

The Female Gaze

In Passages, Quin's logic of three re-emerges as a woman and her male lover search for her lost brother across a Mediterranean landscape. That this book's position will be one of ambivalent ‘possibility’ is evident from these opening sentences with the push and pull between opposite statements that ‘there's every chance. No chance at all’ ‘my brother is dead’. This structure, where apparently opposing positions or perspectives in fact coexist, underlies the quest narrative in Passages. Like Three – and indeed Berg – the direction of the narrative resists linear trajectory and either/or binaries to offer up a more expansive both/and space of ‘possibility’, of ‘what is possible’, where statements or an outcome can be true, false and/or indeterminable at once.

Passages ends mid-sentence with the possibility of ‘the sea that soon perhaps we will cross’ (108) and no full stop, like Berg. And, like Three, Passages is a split form text. It is divided into four sections: two told from the woman's perspective in run-on prose that moves between first person and third person free indirect style, and two in the form of the man's annotated journals. Although these perspectives and forms are distinct and separated out, they also echo and reverberate with each other – like the several diary forms of Three – to offer multiple and often conflicting versions of the same events. In Three, Leonard and Ruth pore over an archive of documents, recordings and objects left behind by S in their unsuccessful search for the ‘truth’ of what happened and their desire for some kind of contact with her. But rather than the static location of Three in ‘the Grey House’ in England where Ruth and Leonard have been left by S, Passages is a text of transit and the shifting locations of hotels and trains. In Passages, the clues or documents relating to the missing brother are so few that even the existence of such materials is unclear – ‘I remember where I came across his signature, that perhaps wasn't there at all’ (2) – and his voice is absent from the text, so that here the desired third character entirely eludes the narrative and cannot be located at all.

When I had got the damage repaired, and my goods and furniture placed in order again in the house and store, I continued to attend with my wonted carefulness to the business; but it is just and right, in this unvarnished narrative, to confess that I sometimes, as the moon of fortune was waxing, felt myself growing inclined to try my hand, like my neighbours, at a spec. However, I wrestled against the hazardous inclination with surprising fortitude, considering how I was tempted, until an event came to pass, which by its issues, as will appear in the sequel, was plainly ordained to be a trial. The matter arose thus.

At the time I was in the Bonnytown school, a boy was there by name Alek Preston, a spirited, clever, venturesome creature, as gleg as a trout, and souple as an eel: nothing would do for him but going to sea, which he did in a vessel from Leith, about the time my father took me into the smiddy to be a nailer: we had been great companions and sworn brethren in many a funny prank and harmless frolic. Indeed, he had such a natural instinct for mirth, that it was impossible to be half an hour in his company without being diverted, or to become acquainted with him without liking him for life, and yet he was the most thoughtless thing that man could put trust in. That part of his character I had, however, forgotten; I recollected only his light-heartedness and ever gambolling gaiety.

One day, as I was walking on some purpose anent seeds along Greenwich Street, I fell in with a sick sailor sitting on a door-step, in a very disconsolate condition.

He was barefooted; his trousers, which had been of superfine navy blue, though full of unsewed rents and holes, had never been mended; his jacket, too, was of the best stuff, with many small brass buttons, men-of-war's fashion, but in no belter plight, and he wore a slouched canvass hat that was either pitched or black painted.

A quotation of dubious origin, but often attributed to George Orwell, states that ‘we sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm’. This gothic vision of a shadowy threat, repressed in order for civilian life to function normally, speaks deeply to an underlying cultural anxiety around war. It is, of course, absolutely correct that members of the US armed forces put themselves in harm's way, and that the general population remains blissfully ignorant of the full reality of war. Whether or not the repeated invasions in the Middle East, carried out by the United States and its allies against a broad and shifting spectre of ‘terror’, do anything to keep American citizens safe in their beds is another question entirely. The death and destruction wrought upon countries like Iraq (the focus of this chapter) and the trauma and abandonment of American troops at home are constantly haunting reminders that war is not something that can comfortably be ignored, even if it occurs in seemingly distant and ‘exotic’ lands, easily characterised through an Orientalist lens as Other. This chapter will develop the idea of an American imperial gothic, examining three key texts that demonstrate its presence and what it has to offer to a discussion of US imperial conflict and its representation in literature and wider media.

The examples given are purposefully drawn from popular culture, and variously reflect and comment on dominant attitudes to US imperialism. The first is American Sniper, the 2012 memoir of Chris Kyle: ‘the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history’ (Kyle 2012, cover), who claims to have accumulated at least 160 confirmed kills (Kyle 2012, 6). The story was brought to the screen in Clint Eastwood's blockbuster film version in 2014, after Kyle's own shooting death at the hands of a fellow veteran. The film's handling of this aspect will be discussed alongside the book itself. The second example is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019): a video game that, as part of a long-running series, has come to represent what might be the most globally dominant conception of contemporary armed conflict, and one that deserves close scrutiny. The intertextual relationship between games, films and military memoir is one that will be shown to flow continually back and forth.

Which Africa? Whose Africa? From Hokusai to Romare Bearden

In a handwritten prayer Walcott composed for Walker's widow to accompany an unpublished drawing in which the woman watches over her sleeping child, the mother and wife mourning her husband expresses her hope that his soul will travel back to Africa. In the published version of Walker, this prayer is not included, but it finds its visual counterpart in the transformation of the play's Chorus into a group of African warriors who, in the 2001 production, invaded the stage with colourful costumes, loud music, vigorous dancing and singing in Yoruba (W92–5, 114). The inclusion of African rituals in the economy of Walker pays homage to the fact that Walker was proud of his heritage and of the noble history of Africa: ‘When we take a retrospective view of the arts and sciences – the wise legislators – the Pyramids, and other magnificent buildings – the turning of the channel of the river Nile, by the sons of Africa or of Ham, among whom learning originated, and was carried thence into Greece’, he wrote, ‘the children of our great progenitor I am indeed cheered’ (WAP21–2). At the same time, however, Walker was vehemently opposed to the ‘colonizing plan’ which entailed the ‘repatria-tion’ of free Blacks by the American Colonization Society (WAP47–82), and Walcott had always shared Walker's rejection of the idea of going back to Africa as an answer for the descendants of the enslaved population. In Dream on Monkey Mountain, where the Chorus, at some point, also becomes the ‘tribes’, the ‘dream’ of a return to Africa is initiated by the White Goddess, who represents the white colonial world. Her beheading results in the destruction of the ‘white mask’ which represents the end of the yearning to be white that plagued colonial subjects – ‘this rage for whiteness’ – but is also an attack to responses to that mask that Walcott considered self-defeatingly separatist. The real home of the protagonist of Dream on Monkey Mountain, the play insists, is not Africa but Monkey Mountain or the Caribbean, and Walker seems to make a similar point regarding North America through Walker's wife Eliza who, when Walker declares that Africa is their ‘true land’, quickly rebuffs him: ‘Which Africa?

D’Annunzio's library at the Vittoriale features numerous books dedicated to Islam, among with several fine editions of the Koran, which testify to his interest in Arabic culture. The fascination with Egypt, to which he travelled in 1899 with Eleonora Duse and Matilde Serao, resurfaces in Notturno. This openness toward the ‘other’ only apparently contrasts with his colonialist stance. It is known that, like his friend Edoardo Scarfoglio, he was a convinced supporter of the occupation of Libya, to which he paid tribute in Merope. Canti della guerra d’oltremare (1912), and that he went as far as praising Italian aerial bombings that violated the Aja Convention. Given D’Annunzio's involvement in colonial history, and his association with Fascism, it is not surprising that the reception of his work in the Arab world should be a complex matter. This chapter explores the image that the media, cultural magazines and the academic establishment shaped of D’Annunzio from the 1930s to today. Drawing on articles issued in the Arabic press by renowned intellectuals like Jorji Zaydan and Derrini Khashaba in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as articles published recently in the Arab media, it investigates what aspects of D’Annunzio attracted Arab intellectuals during the time in which modern Italian literature was beginning to be translated into Arabic. It also examines the dramatic changes that this reception has undergone in the last few decades.

D’Annunzio and Cultural Journalism in Egypt between 1876 and 1935

As Isabella Camara D’Afflitto notes, Arabic intellectuals, between 1876 and 1935, had a cosmopolitan outlook. In these years, they commented on, reviewed and translated a great deal of literary works published in Europe. Italian literature remained marginal in this project, and Italian authors were often translated from French, English or Russian editions. Maria Avino notes that three cultural magazines played a crucial role in divulgation of the Occidental cultural production: al-Hilāl; al Muqtaţaf, the publication of which lasted several decades; and al-Ğāmi’ah. These magazines acquired a great authority in literary matters, and it is to these publications that we refer to research the image of D’Annunzio that emerges in the Arab world during these years.

I am both at my desk and in a Jordanian refugee camp. An apparatus embraces the upper part of my head, slightly weighing down on my skull. I am able to visually explore the mediated space in which I find myself: a small, sparse, windowless room. The walls here have the sheen of light plastic material; slim mattresses are arranged on the floor; a CRT television is propped in a corner beneath a single shelf; a clothes hamper and a couple of mirrors are the only other furniture. I hear the voice of a young girl and look around to find the source – she sits on the floor, talking to me in a language I don't understand. Her voice is tinny and echoes, a marker of inexpensive audio recording equipment and the poor acoustics of this prefabricated space. But an English translation of her words begins speaking above this in the mix, and this other voice is much closer and richer, reverberating around my skull thanks to the in-ear headphones that accompany my PS4 virtual reality rig.

Through this voice-over, the girl introduces herself as Sidra. She tells me that she is from Syria, but has lived here in the Zaatari camp in Jordan for the last year and a half. I am at her eye-level, seemingly sitting across from her, sharing space on the Persian rug. As I settle in to hear more, my vision darkens – a fade through black takes me to the same room, but later, and I presume that the other children of various ages suddenly in this space are the family Sidra is currently describing. Unlike Sidra in those earlier moments, her siblings gather themselves to leave without acknowledging my presence at all, a snub which seems aligned to my new position, which is higher than them, looking down (probably the height of an average standing adult). Over the following seven minutes I am granted a tour of the refugee camp, oriented by the translated voice-over. Routines of school, cooking, sports, videogaming, fitness, and eating are shown in such a way that I am placed firmly at their centre, albeit for the most part as an unacknowledged observer. At the end of this tour, Sidra comments that she feels she has been here long enough, and would like to leave.

Asian American Christians in the twenty-first century, like the more than 24 million Asian Americans, reflect a wide range of educational attainment, economic status, political orientation and diversity of language. They also experience fraught intergenerational dynamics and occupy an uneasy interstitial space in the American racial landscape. Identifying with a religion that continues to be associated with Euro-American culture and white racial privilege complicates the picture. Given the Euro-American perception of Asians as quintessentially ‘not Christian’ (or ‘heathen’), Christianity among Asian Americans has been a confounding idea. But the ground is shifting in the study of American Christianity and in Asian American studies; thus, many of this essay's conclusions necessarily will be provisional.

We begin with a discussion of the evolving meaning of the term ‘Asian American’. The origins of the moniker can be traced to the Third World Liberation Front student strikes at San Francisco State University (1968) and the University of California, Berkeley (1969). Prior to this, ‘Oriental’ was commonly used by missionaries and social scientists to identify people from Asia. Originally considered a descriptive term, ‘Oriental’ became problematic when it was rejected by Asian American activists and critiqued by postcolonial scholar Edward Said. ‘Asian American’ seemed to be a better description of the diversity of peoples with Asian origins and escaped the Western and white ‘gaze’.

Most Asian Americans, however, connect primarily to their ethnic communities. From the 1970s, ethnic identity – rather than Asian American consciousness – heightened as immigration from Asia swelled dramatically. Asian American organisations became tertiary spaces for pan-ethnic coalitions. But these efforts were often fraught as Filipinos, Southeast Asians, South Asians and other groups challenged the dominance of East Asians in the early 1970s. Each subsequent wave of Asian immigration has required Asian American organisations to broaden their coalition and stretch their definition of Asian American. For example, after the 9/11 attacks and anti-Muslim backlash, the inclusion of Middle Eastern and West Asian peoples under the ‘Asian American’ umbrella has been debated extensively.

The US Census Bureau's efforts to classify Americans by race has both fuelled uncertainty about and placed limits on the term ‘Asian American’. In 1980 and before, the census forms listed specific Asian ancestries as separate groups, along with White and Black or Negro. But in 1977 the US federal government required government agencies to maintain statistics on racial groups, including on ‘Asian or Pacific Islander’.