Transnational Writing on Italy : Self and Place in Contemporary Relocation Narratives

Relocation narratives form a distinct subgenre of contemporary travel memoirs concerned with the experiences of travellers who become settlers in foreign locales and narrate their experience of cultural accommodation in autobiographical accounts. This book seeks to understand the discourse of identity/alterity in relocation writing, which focuses on the topos of everyday life from a transnational perspective, one which embraces a cosmopolitan orientation of openness to cultural difference. Focusing on three transnational writers in Italy and their respective relocation trilogies – Frances Mayes’s Tuscan memoirs, Annie Hawes’s Ligurian memoirs, and Tim Parks’s Verona memoirs – the study examines the sustained engagement with place and place-based practices given narrative voice through multipart works which trace their migrating identities. These nonfiction accounts contribute to a broader polyphonic literature in which transnational writers give voice to personal stories shaped by intercultural experiences. Relocation narratives thus provide a powerful localised lens through which to examine how identities are dialogically transformed through contact with difference in a globalised world, contributing to a better understanding of cultural change in late modernity. By giving readers an opportunity to reflect on identity and diversity in local/global contexts, transnational literature provides an important space for critical, creative and transcultural exchange.