Short Bio
Serena Cianciotto obtained a PhD in Philology and Literary Critics – Modern Literatures under joint supervision at the University of Siena and the University of Leipzig. Her comparative research project La famiglia come passato. Il romanzo multigenerazionale in Europa all’alba del nuovo millennio investigates the subgenre of the multigenerational novel in Europe at the beginning of the 20th and 21st centuries through a corpus of Italian, German, and Portuguese novels. She is also concerned with Portuguese-language literature from Brazil and Angola, with the link between history and memory in family or multigenerational novels, and with the status of character in fiction and drama.
Project for the Network
Fictional and Non-Fictional Family Narrations about Italian Emigration to Brazil
At the turn of the 19th to the 20th century a huge number of Italians emigrated to Brazil, especially in the time span 1875-1902. Italians, mainly from Veneto, were the largest immigrant group to the Brazilian states in the South, such as São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul, where workforce was needed for cultivating coffee and populating the land.
Fictional and Non-Fictional Family Narrations about Italian Emigration to Brazil is a comparative study investigating the circulation of people, documents, and ideas from the North-East of Italy to the South of Brazil by that epoch, on the one side, and the circulation of aesthetics and narratives through space and time, on the other side. In order to do this, emigrants’ personal documents will be analyzed, such as diaries or letters, as well as contemporary family or multigenerational novels by Italian and Brazilian authors, with the aim to understand to what extent historical sources include some narrative topoi about emigration and, in contrast, how does 21st-century fiction deal with History and oral family stories about immigration to the other side of the ocean.