The Heart and the Island

Makes the case for a distinctly Sicilian American literature. In The Heart and the Island , Chiara Mazzucchelli explores the strong bond between Sicilian American writers and the island of Sicily. Self-contained yet connected to the mainland, geographically separated from yet politically united to the rest of Italy, Sicily occupies a unique position. Throughout the twentieth century, the sense of a distinct sicilianità -or Sicilianness-has manifested itself in a corpus of texts that, although su