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

Focusing on three transnational writers in Italy and their respective relocation trilogies – Frances Mayes, Annie Hawes, and Tim Parks – the study examines the process of identity reconstruction through sustained engagement with foreign place and place-based practices.

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 serial 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 the authors' migrating identities. These nonfiction accounts contribute to a broader polyphonic literature in which transnational writers give voice to personal stories shaped by intercultural experiences which provide a powerful localised lens to examine how identities are dialogically transformed through contact with difference in a globalised world. By giving readers an opportunity to reflect on identity and diversity in local/global contexts, transnational literature contributes to a better understanding of cultural change in late modernity and provides an important space for critical, creative, and transcultural exchange.