Narrative Patterns and Evolutionary Trends in Italian British Autobiographical Writings

This paper focuses on Italian British autobiographies and memoirs, a body of work that has emerged since 1938 but remains largely neglected by academic criticism. Their narrative structures and evolutionary trends are presented and discussed here for the first time. Laying the foundation for a new branch of writing, the picaresque story of the Italian Scot Eugenio D’Agostino, Wandering Minstrel (1938), was followed by editorial projects which firmly situated the protagonists’ stories in specific temporal and spatial contexts. It was only in the 1990s-2010s, however, that the second season of these ‘migrant epics’ began to give a collective voice to the Italian community. War memoirs such as Joe Pieri’s Isle of the Displaced : An Italian Scot’s Memoirs of Internment in the Second World War (1997) and Peter Ghiringhelli’s A British Boy in Fascist Italy (2010) seek to expose the horrors experienced between 1940 and 1944 while restoring dignity to their victims. Drawing on extracts from a wide range of sources as well as on the latest studies on life writing, this intertextual exploration traces the shift from factual, historical narratives to more evocative and experimental forms of expression. Since 2016, writers like Rafaella Cruciani and Ann Pia have shared their inner feelings and emotions, creatively experimenting with patterns and forms. Looking ahead, it will be essential to examine the future trajectory of this evolving tradition and the potential formation of a literary canon.