A Second Renaissance: Italian Literary Cultures in the USA after World War II

This essay introduces the special issue “Transatlantic Literary Transfers in the Second Italian Renaissance: Italian culture in the US in the Postwar Era,” presenting new knowledge on the collaborative, transnational network that emerged between Italy and the United States in the postwar years and facilitated the circulation of Italian literary products in the US. By considering literary objects as a special class of products that participated to the establishment and consolidation of “Made in Italy,” and by showing how Italian literary cultures functioned as vectors of a “new” Italian modernity, the essay claims that the success of “Made in Italy” was due in no small part to a storytelling strategy that emphasized: 1) the strong friendship between the two nations in the context of the new, globalized world; 2) the mobilization of the trope of the Renaissance in the service of a projected continuity between Italian early and “new” modernity.