Between Entertainment and Education: Early Serialized Literature in the Italian-American Press

Abstract

In the first decades of Italian mass migration to the United States, the Italian- American press was a site of emergence and negotiation of an Italian-American identity. Indeed, the Italian press was the site of intense ideological struggle for the minds of the immigrants between the newspapers controlled by the elite prominenti and their radical opponents, the sovversivi. From the 1890s, serialized popular novels and novelettes appeared in the pages of Italian-American periodicals and newspapers of all political stances. They were simultaneously the first cultural expressions of the intellectual elites of the colony and the first cultural products consumed by the working class of the nascent Italian community; therefore, they played a central role in shaping their tastes and values. Although these works were offshoots of the Italian and French traditions of the feuilleton, their development in the US was shaped by the new audience’s needs. By describing urban squalor, the criminal underworld, and the excesses of the upper classes, they educated immigrant readers, mediating their experience of the world of the capitalist city. But, no matter the intended ideological coercion, for their working-class readers they were empowering experiences dramatizing the social and racial vulnerability of the condition of immigrants in the capitalist city and showing how vulnerable conditions could be mobilized toward empathy, community, and social change.